Born to Exist is the third part of Joseph Toonga’s Hip Hop Dance Trilogy. It opens with a dancer standing, legs astride, centre stage, her back to the audience. Slowly, she starts to move, gradually expanding and extending with every part of her body, her torso undulating, her hips circling. Two more women join her and together they perform a tightly choreographed dance work to a score by ‘Mikey J’ Asante.

Toonga has drawn on street dance styles, to develop a theatrical performance technique and vocabulary. The dancers displayed accuracy, precision and sharp focus in carefully structured sequences, full of choreographic content, which called to mind urban violence and scenes of racial conflict. They moved in synch with one another, despite their markedly different heights and physiques, subtly taking cues from the sound of each others’ breath and footfall, as well as from the soundtrack.

This is not an easy work to watch: the dancers speak, one delivering a long and weary monologue in Portuguese that seemed to be about how terribly tired she is and how difficult it is to be a black woman; another dancer angrily demanded, over and over, ‘See me; why can’t you see me?’, before looking members of the audience in the eye and telling them to ‘F*** off’. Nobody answered back, and nobody walked out, but at that moment, I felt that anything might happen.

I was disappointed that there was no accompanying programme available for the performance; not even a QR code to link to information about the production. I had to search the Web to find the names of the three accomplished and talented dancers: Aisha Webber, Amanda de Souza, and Paris Crossley.

Maggie Watson
12 March 2023

Find out more about Joseph Toonga and Just Us Dance Theatre here