DESCRIBED AS a jaw dropping fusion of lyrical film and explosive breakdance, White Caps from Bristol’s Champloo Dance Company is sure to be one of the highlights of this year’s Baboró festival.
In a breathtaking multi-media performance, White Caps follows the journey of two young men as they embark on an epic and gruelling personal adventure. The tale is told going back and forth between dance and film.
From the valleys of life to the highest heights, White Caps is a compassionate, exhilarating tale of a search for harmony, and an unmissable opportunity to see two of Britain’s top B-boys pushing the boundaries of their art.
The White Caps soundtrack was created by Type Sun – leading lights in the current Bristol music scene - who make sonic magic with a combination of harmony and root tradition drums. In producing this unique score Type Sun have collaborated with a variety of artists including Phil King, Eleanor Rusbridge, BOY, Leeza Jessie, and DJ Rouge.
White Caps was created by Wilkie Branson and performed by Wilkie and Joel Daniel, who are collectively known as Champloo. Champloo are firmly established as an award-winning national B-boy company who produce outstanding work not only in a live context but also extend their practice into astonishing dance-film projects; as well as galvanising and inspiring hundreds of young people each year through their ongoing youth programme.
Ahead of his show’s Galway visit, Wilkie Branson talked about his company’s work, first describing how he himself discovered street dance.
“I started dancing kind of late, I was about 16,” he says. “I got into this hip-hop crew that had DJs and graffiti artists and all that just outside London. A couple years later I moved to Bristol where I met Joel and we started doing B-boy dance shows and competitions around the UK and then internationally.”
Branson credits the cultural ambience of Bristol with giving him the inspiration to see that his B-boy street dances could become a vehicle for more ambitious artistic expression.
“There’s a vibrant cultural ethos in Bristol that is quite left-wing,” he observes. “There’s a lot of pride about doing things differently. In our B-boy dances and shows we were doing things that were different and we came to realise that there was an expressive capacity to do much more with the dance and to take it further.”
Having started out in the milieu of street dance, would Branson say there are particular aspects of that genre that continue to inform his work?
“The very fact that hip-hop is a melting-pot of styles and draws heavily on all sorts of influences is something that still very much defines what we do,” he replies. “Our dance vocabulary comes from the roots of B-boy dance. And hip-hop is a very community-based activity and we do a lot of dance education work which is very important to us.”
Branson has written that “when we began White Caps in June 2009 we knew that the creation itself would draw some parallels between the show's journey and its struggles, but we had no idea just how much of an adventure it would become. After setting out to create a dance piece it wasn’t long before we found ourselves on an epic pathway to reach our real-life White Caps”.
He expands on these observations for this interview: “We got a small grant initially but as the project escalated it wasn’t enough to cover all our costs. We were really pushed to our limits to complete the show. We couldn’t afford to hire the kind of elaborate rigs we needed for the filming so we had to learn how to make them ourselves from scratch.
“We had to climb up a mountain twice for key scenes, once in the middle of an epic storm. We’d be getting up at 3am to do shoots. It was a huge level of endeavour but we all realised what we wanted to achieve with the show and it was worth it in the end.”
Branson goes on to discuss the show’s fusion of film and dance.
“It was difficult to get that right,” he says. “I had seen other dance productions that incorporated film but often the film seemed to be just an afterthought and so the two elements didn’t really gel. Because I have a background in film I came at it differently. I wanted a film that was alive and that was an integral part of what was happening onstage.
“The dance is performed entirely behind a large gauze screen. The dance sections are interspersed with film, which is in front projected onto the gauze screen and I think that let the elements of dance and film gel really well and in a holistic way.”
White Caps will be at the Town Hall for three performances only; on Monday October 17 at 12 noon and 7pm and Tuesday 18 at 11am. Tickets are €8 and there is a family ticket price (4 tickets ) of €25. Tickets are available from the Town Hall on 091 - 569777 and www.tht.ie
