Crazy Smooth: In My Body Review ★★★★★

Dance takes a toll on the body; and street dance, with its feats of seemingly impossible acrobatics and intense competition to be top dog, perhaps more so than other dance forms. Yet, as Crazy Smooth’s thrilling and though-provoking show In My Body amply demonstrates, break dancing is a deep passion, an irresistible life-long compulsion.

Crazy Smooth, aka Yvon Soglo, is a 44-years-old Canadian b-boy, the founder and creative director of the award-winning company Bboyizm. In My Body opens with him standing immobile in a hazy pool of light, his near-naked body the canvas for a projection of swirling red shapes by the multimedia designer Thomas Payette.

On voiceover he defiantly proclaims ‘b-boy for life’, despite, he tells us, four knee operations and the ever present risk that his tendons will play up again.

The pulsating music strikes up and he is joined by his eight-strong cast, some veterans, like DKC Freeze, now within touch of 60, and the enviably trim and athletic 50-year-old grandmother Tash, some much younger representing the up-and-coming generation of an ever popular dance form, and a couple in between.

Energetic, extremely skilled and acrobatic as they whirl, spin and flip, age seems not to touch them, older dancers a full match for the young ones - and then some.


Dancers Crazy Smooth and Tiffay Leung in In My Body. Photo: Jerick Collantes
By now, invited pre-show by company assistant choreographer Saxon Frazer to make its appreciation heard throughout –‘the more that you give them, the more that they’re going to give back to you’ – the audience are in full voice, because the reality is that breakdancing is thrilling and when performed with this kind of vigour, commitment and humour, it’s contagious.

It has an agonistic element, each dancer both showing off their prowess and challenging others to more; it’s exhibition and contest and fun all at once.

There is, however, more to Crazy Smooth’s finely textured show In My Body. It is also an attempt to explain the compulsion to dance; in a filmed interview projected onto the backcloth, Tash tells of the time when she stopped dancing and found a run-of-the-mill job in order to bring up her children. But fighting her passion for dance made her physically ill: ‘you don’t own your body anymore’, she states, ‘your passion is the only thing that belongs to you.’


Tash and the cast of In My Body. Photo: Jerrick Collantes
A final section scripted by Alejandro Rodriguez is a poetic hymn to the power and freedom of breakdance, where ‘gravity is just another law that doesn’t apply to us’, reminding us of its birth among disaffected and dispossessed urban youth, and the importance of legacy.

Crazy Smooth: In My Body is a thrilling, entertaining, often very moving and always inspirational show, that goes a long way towards communicating the culture of hip hop: much more than a dance – a passion and ultimately a way of living life.