BOTTOM LINE: An incredible dance show, unlike anything you’ve seen before.
The Groovaloos are a dance company from LA. They’re hip-hop dancers with diverse backgrounds who came together a while back as a community of freestylers who liked to jam with one another. They’re perhaps the most talented group of hip-hop dancers out there, at least as far as I’m aware. You’ve probably seen them on TV in one way or another, as they’ve been featured on several of those reality talent shows over the past couple of years (Fox’s So You Think You Can Dance, MTV’s America’s Best Dance Crew). Their autobiographical show, Groovaloo, has grown and changed since its inception in 2003, and it now comes to New York to play at the Joyce Theater after a successful run in LA. After its brief stay in New York — it plays though September 27 – Groovaloo will tour the country beginning January 10.
Performance-wise, Groovaloo is an athletic, energy-packed 90 minutes that gets the audience’s attention and doesn’t let go. Each of the 14 dancers is better than the next, and with men and women of all cultural backgrounds, the cast is totally captivating. Each dancer gets a solo moment, and as the show reveals itself, the audience learns each dancer’s story and how they got to where they are now. Although there are many featured moments for each dancer where they can break and freestyle and do their own thing, there are also many synchronized and choreographed moments where some or all of the dancers perform the same steps or tricks in smaller groups or as bigger production numbers. The variety keeps the production moving along at a nice pace.
I remember it pretty clearly. I came home to find the red light on the answering machine ominously blinking away, and checked to see how many messages there were for me (eight, as I recall). They were from a family member, and the gist of the first message was that this person needed to talk to me right now. The second message was a repeat of the first, mostly. The third through eighth were hit-and-runs of “where are you?” I called them back to stop the insanity and was immediately pounced upon with the statement, “You’re getting a cell phone this weekend. You are totally getting a cell phone this weekend. I’m fed up of waiting for you to return to planet Earth from your joyriding.”