The Stage

Pied Piper

Published Monday 9 March 2009 at 13:45 by Sarah Wilkinson

The opening scene of Boy Blue Entertainment’s Pied Piper is brilliantly intimidating. As Michael “Mikey J” Asante’s hip-hop beats pound through the auditorium, “hoodies” dressed in black seep on to the stage and sprawl over the graffitied urban landscape. Scaling the wire mesh cage and scampering sinisterly over the bins, they are utterly convincing as the “vermin” terrorizing the streets, every erratic twitch confirming their correlation with the rats from Robert Browning’s 1842 poem The Pied Piper of Hamelin - upon which the production is based.

As part of The Barbican’s “bite 09” program, Boy Blue Entertainment takes Browning’s poem and makes it startlingly relevant for a modern audience with this hip-hop adaptation. The company, comprising over 30 young dancers from East London (with few trained professionals), is ideally suited to the piece given that the disturbing youth culture portrayed is, for many of them, an everyday reality.

Unfortunately, though the production makes a huge impact in its opening scene, this is not sustained throughout. At times the dances feel overly long: in particular the one in which myriad scantily-clad women gyrate and grind around the Pied Piper. The solos for the Piper (danced by the choreographer, Kenrick “H2O” Sandy) also lack intensity and occasionally seem frustratingly self-indulgent.

En masse, however, the dancers are spectacular. As they move collectively the stage resonates with energy and confidence. Their enjoyment is particularly palpable in the finale and as the stage fills with the entire company it is hard not to feel as though you are witnessing the culmination of something very special.