Interview with Dancefloor Dance Company

Who are you and where do you come from?
[F] I am Fred, I grew up in Paris but been working in Geneva for 11 years now. Geneva is where I started to dance, learning salsa with Jang Widler from Salsavirus and hiphop with many great teachers. Dancing with many different people and learning different dance style built my dance identity all along those 11 years
[M] I am Marc from Ivory Coast. I live in Geneva since 1998. I dance hip hop since I am 8 years and I discovered salsa at the age of 19. I loves mixing styles; especially hip hop and salsa, but I am open to many kind of fusion as the other members of the company are.
[L] I am born in Switzerland and native from Congo. I begun dance with ballet, jazz, modern and breakin' then I graduated in jazz and hip-hop at the Resodanse-Station school in Neuchâtel. After that I did a lot of training with differents international dancers of differents styles. Today you can find all these colors in my salsa.
[C] I am Corinne, born in Paris and native of Martinique. I did a training course of Morden' Jazz and Ballet in Geneva and mix these styles in the salsa.

When and how did you start dancing together?
[F] Well that is a bit messy. I started Dancefloor Dance Company with Boogtom from South Korea in 2009 mixing salsa & hiphop. I started working with Corinne in 2010 in "Riddim" a dance company mixing salsa hiphop contemporary and afro. We had 2 other members: Karuk Gregoire (organizer of Lyon Salsa Congress) and Diana Taveira. In 2012, we stopped Riddim but we kept working together with Corinne. Early 2013, I started to collaborate with Marc as we had the same influences from hiphop and salsa. I was looking to pursue Dancefloor's work and was looking for a new partner as Tom had left back to Korea. In 2014 we started to talk with Marc about integrating girls to Dancefloor and thought about Corinne that I knew well & Laeticya with whom we had very good feeling while dancing in parties and who was sharing our love for salsa and other dance styles. September 2014 we also started our dance school where the 4 of us are teaching and where we can teach our style: http://www.dancefloorgenevasalsa.ch/

How would you define your shows?
[F] Most of the time our show are fusions between latin dances: salsa, chacha, boogaloo... and other dance styles that the music suggest to us. So the first adjective that comes to my mind about our shows would be original compared to a regular salsa show. The shows can be really different from one show to the other (for instance the Music Box compared to the men's chacha) but the common part is we try to be some character in our shows and to keep the feeling of those characters all along the show. Attitude is very important, so I would say we want to make shows original with attitude!
We have a process to build our show: We always start from the music, it has to be our guide and to make us feel some kind of emotion if we then want to be able to transmit something with our dance to the audience.
Second step is slicing the choreo in different parts depending on what the music tells us. We like to develop one style on a full part of the song to express something more deeply than just mixing some different moves from different dances one after the other.
For instance for the Music box show, we started with a part of puppet leading followed by a part of control and isolation, then a part of afro moves, a part of slides and finished with a part of speed control. We try to keep a consistency and a direction in our show.

Until now I observed that your shows have been very successful in Swiss Germany. How is it in the other places?
[F] I would say that our shows are appreciated in most of the places where we performed. The preference for one show or for the other will depend on the audience. Also, some cities or countries may be more sensitive to our style (like Spain where we met great success), but we also experienced some stages with less enthousiasm from the audience. Anyway, having performed on 4 continents, we are rather happy that our work has been appreciated in many places.

In the last show that you performed in "Fall in Salsa" in Bern, you were dressed like prisoners in Guantanamo. What is the story of the show?
[F] The idea of the show comes from the music: "Summertime" by Ray Barretto with that sad intro and the rebellion feeling that comes in the chacha part. So the show is the story of 4 prisoners locked in their jail. They find a way to escape their cell and then run to escape guards and recover their liberty.
The show is the succession of traps they need to avoid to flee the prison needing sometimes to run, sometimes to hide, sometimes to break a wall... until the final scene where the jail keepers find them.

You don't use acrobatics. What do you think about it?
[F] When you consider a show, all your dance knowledge is an addition of tools in a library that you can use to transmit the message you want to convey in your show. Depending on the music or on the message, some tools may be adequate or inappropriate.
Acrobatics is another tool from the library. It is a powerful tool in a sense that it can impress the audience (most of the time the audience reacts on acrobatics). However it has to be used in the good context on the right timing and of course properly. We sometimes use some "powermoves" (like Dolphin's Rise in Music Box), but we do not master acrobatics, so we do not use them as we think using tools we don't master is inefficient.

Who are your source of inspiration in salsa & hiphop?
[F] We have so many, it is hard to say. Not only in hiphop or salsa but ballet or contemporary show for concepts or group effects. We like to share our source of inspiration. We regularly do it on our Facebook page where we share our work and videos we like: www.facebook.com/DancefloorGeneva

Where are your next performances?
[F] Next in Swiss Germany will be Zurich Salsa Festival where we will perform "Prison Break" on a big stage for the first time, then Alicante, Frankfurt, Troyes, Afro Latin Festival in Geneva and Palaiseau close to Paris (almost in a row).
We keep our schedule updated on our website
http://www.dancefloorgenevasalsa.ch/?page_id=11087

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