Review: Session, The Station

Still House brought the powerful Steppaz to Bristol last weekend for a three-day stint in The Station courtyard. I caught the Saturday matinee performance with my 3-year-old – it rained! I always seem to catch Still House performances in the rain. I’m starting to think it’s part of the show – there’s certainly something that the ‘sky as a roof’ and the ‘keep dancing no matter what’ sensibility brings to the show. It’s thrilling, it makes you feel alive.

Steppaz started with ten girls on ‘stage’ (our tarmac amphitheater), a perfect gender foil to the five talented boys in the Empire Sounds band who kicked out some amazing tunes from the adjacent tent. The dancers gave us about five separate pieces, merging from solo performances to group choreography seamlessly throughout, with anyone not on stage perching in amongst the audience. The solo pieces were meaningful and emotive. The group pieces were energetic and fluid, often coming right up in your face, almost scraping your knees – on purpose I assume.

The girls danced sometimes modern, sometimes traditional, sometimes somewhere in between afro-rhythms with skill and grace. The serious attitudes, in traditional krumping fashion, were deliciously mean and authentic. But glimmers of cracks in that attitude could be spotted when they would dance in a group and exchange cheeky grins, maybe pinching themselves that they were, in fact, on tour! Woohoo!

The second piece offered a more contemporary, interpretive approach. The third sped up the tempo significantly, with the drummer working overtime. The dancers all seemed extremely comfortable at this speed, and the footwork only got more impressive.

The fourth piece started with a pause. A new 12ish-year-old girl appears, firmly standing across from the ten much older dancers – she glares them down as if to say ‘don’t underestimate me!’, then totally kills it with a solo. This is the start of a new phase of the performance, when the younger members of Steppaz Academy start appearing in large numbers, almost out of nowhere. My friend turned to me and said ‘they keep getting younger!’.

Eventually, there are 23 dancers on stage and the rain really starts. No-one cares, it only seems to amplify the whooping from the crew, mostly the older dancers encouraging the younger. I’m getting goosebumps just writing about it. Out of the 23, only two are boys, who can’t be any older than 13. They split from the rest to give some proper grimey attitude in a dance battle-style set up. Imagine doing that at age 13, being watched by 21 female peers, never mind an audience on top of that!

The band has treated us to grime, Afro-pop and lots in between, but the final dance is an upbeat celebration with everyone on stage moving in such unexpected organic ways, blending and fluid so no one dancer takes the spotlight. Every dancer interprets the beat through their limbs with unbelievable musicality. I’m suddenly aware of how much of Dan Canham’s choreography these young dancers have had to learn.

Yes, they’re young, and anyone expecting the more advanced talent of the professional Still House dancers may have been disappointed. But my god were they good. One dancer boldly wore a ‘Youth’ sweatshirt, because they represented just that: a group of young people from North London forging a future for themselves. They are serious and talented artists, and their infectious dance made me want to get on stage with them. It made me excited about their future. It is, after all, ‘a battle cry and a love song, celebrating community, youth and belonging’.

You can see Session at the National Theatre’s River Stage Festival August 10 & 11.  

For upcoming performances at The Station, visit https://www.creativeyouthnetwork.org.uk/Pages/Events/Category/arts-and-music-events