Sunday afternoon in Tower Hamlets, east London, and the room is full of teenagers hammering out a hip-hop routine, their trainers squeaking rhythmically on the floor. It looks pretty good, but Kenrick Sandy steps in. He’s a powerful presence, with a stillness about him and eyes that you feel are looking into your soul. “I’m listening to the weight distribution,” he tells the dancers, the implication being he’s not hearing what he wants. “Feel the move in your body, don’t just copy the steps.” He quizzes them about exactly what the energy of a step is, the difference between sharp, punchy or explosive. And he’s a stickler for the details: are the fingers together or apart? In a fist, is the thumb on top? In the space of 15 minutes they are transformed.
This is how Sandy’s company Boy Blue got so good. Founded in 2001 with composer Michael “Mikey J” Asante, both not long out of school, the company came out of an earlier incarnation, Matrix, a handful of dancers who’d battle against other crews from all over the capital at streetdance events in south London. But while other groups disbanded, or went off to get “proper” jobs, Boy Blue soared. They were soon training a cohort of 50 young dancers; they won an Olivier award in 2007; became an associate company at the Barbican centre; choreographed for the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony; and were reunited with the ceremony’s director Danny Boyle last year on the opening of Manchester’s shiny new Aviva Studios with an ambitious show, Free Your Mind, that mixed The Matrix with Alan Turing and Mancunian pop culture.
