Ivan Michael Blackstock never stops moving. For the best part of an hour, the choreographer has been patiently explaining his approach to dance, a process that involves springing up from the balls of his feet and gesticulating in time with an imagined rhythm, despite the fact he is seated. “Whether I’m thinking about a performance or making music or picking up a paintbrush – that’s dancing,” he says. “That’s the first gear: the thing through which everything else flows.”
Having worked on Beyoncé’s visual album Black Is King, a journey through Black identity and the global African diaspora, his new show, Traplord, casts the streets of south London as the perfect stage to explore the stereotyping of Black men in western society.
