Standards

The prince of French hip-hop, Pierre Rigal is also an athlete, choreographer and dancer. In ‘Standards’, an extended version of a show that ran in 2012 and earlier this year at the Festival Suresnes Cités Danse, a huge, luminous French flag is draped over the stage, defining the acrobats’ performance space. Here eight dancers work to challenge standardisation and uniformity through a choreography that is at once animal and cerebral, full of ruptured rhythms, groupwork, gradations of colour and the squeak of trainers on the ground, reappropriating the French flag through the culture-heavy language of hip-hop.