In a ten-minute duet, Mario Quinn Lyles and Ella-Gabriel Mason have an embodied onstage conversation about the limitations of dance when classified as street style or concert style.  With each artist proficient in a different style of teaching and performance, the two dancers explore the aesthetics and assumptions of right and wrong at the foundation of modern dance and hip hop.  As they begin to teach one another and try on each other’s movement languages the dancers find what is missing from their own history of movement and what started as a battle emerges into a collaborative game - a new way of speaking across form and personal history.  The movement material, which draws heavily on Mason’s improvisational contemporary style and Lyles’s animation and popping mastery, is complemented by a soundtrack that blends Mason’s explorations of oral history with Lyle’s original music and rhymes. The result is a duet that invites the audience into the emerging collaborative relationship in a vulnerable and playful manner.

Choreography, Text, and Performance by Mario Quinn Lyles and Ella-Gabriel Mason

Premiered at the Kelly Strayhorn Theater in Pittsburgh PA  in 2016
Support from Kelly Strayhorn Theater's newMoves Choreographer Platform