Between Tiny Cities
It sounds like the plot of the best dance movie you’ve never seen – two b-boys from different cities and utterly different walks of life, face off in a breakdance battle towards an unlikely common ground.
Between Tiny Cities isn’t a breakdance film but a dance theatre piece and is closer to real life than any movie.
The work began three years ago as an exchange between Darwin breakdance crew D-City Rockers and Tiny Toones, from Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh.
Although the two crews practised the same specialised, highly skilled and competitive art of b-boying, their crew members couldn’t have come from more different backgrounds, says dancer Aaron Lim.
“A lot of the kids who became the original members of the Tiny Toones were all just kids off the street. They just gravitated towards Tiny Toones founder KK. In Australia, people do each b-boy sounding the other out in the territorial – and humorous – showmanship of the dance form.
“It’s about me and Erak. It’s a duo and pretty much the journey we’ve been on. What it means to be two different b-boys from two different countries, two different worlds, pretty much. How they interact and how their relationship changes over the course of the show.”
Nick Power, one of Australia’s leading contemporary hip-hop dancers choreographed the work to original beats by Jack Prest – whose music also features in Tracks Dance’s Man Made.
Between Tiny Cities is one of a few shows in the Darwin Festival to engage Southeast Asia this year, offering Top End audiences a chance to see a rare collaboration.
“It just seemed like a very obvious thing. Cambodia’s pretty close,” says Lim.
See the event listing.
