The Breakthrough for the Hip Hop Dance
 
Steen Koerner (born 1968) started dancing electric boogie in 1982. Today, he is a prominent hip hop director, choreographer and dancer who has taken hip hop dance into mainstream theatre. He founded in 1987, with buddy and colleague Kenneth Fogel, the hip hop group Out of Control, quickly became active on the international hip hop scene, and later founded the street dancing group The Flying Horses.

Artistic Profile
”This may be the revolution we have been waiting for the last twenty years!” – concluded the French paper Le Monde, after Koerner’s show received a prestigious prize at the Festival d’Avignon in 1997. Two years later, Out of Control was invited to Maison de la Danse in Lyon (France), then  to Japan, where the group made the Japanese hip hoppers break all the rules and crawl onto the stage. The same year Out of Control became the main attraction at Urban Spectacle at La Villette in Paris. In 2000, Koerner choreographed The Conquistador for the leading French hip hop group, Actual Force.
What the audiences witnessed was theatrical body control, with techniques taken from around the globe: Chinese martial arts, Italian commedia dell arte, Brazilian capoeria, Bournonville ballet steps, Harlem robot-moves, and Bollywood stories in a well-composed dramaturgic context.  
 
Koerner’s various groups have continuously expanded and travelled the world. His ability to interpret classical playwrights and ballets in an original and contemporary body language has garnered him a wide audience. His radical new interpretation of The Nutcracker received the prestigious Reumert Award in 1993.  Koerner has prepared a hip hop version of La Sylphide in October 2006 for Aveny-T Theatre in Copenhagen and a new piece for the Pantomime Theatre at Tivoli in 2007.
CPH (Change Perspective Here), the production company behind these huge successes consists of an artistic trefoil:  Steen Koerner himself, writer and rapper Clemens Telling and composer and percussionist Yo Akim Hjejle.
This artistic trefoil breaks down artistic as well as socio-cultural limits in their effort to bring a variety of the subculture styles to established stages:  “A show like Slumprinsessen og De 7 Smalltime Hustlers [The Slum Princess and the 7 Smalltime Hustlers] also shows that it is possible to get different nationalities, religions and disciplines to work together."

Current Productions

The Sylfide
(2006)
A hip-hop version of Bounonville's classical ballet.

Hip Hip to the Hop
(2006)
Aveny-T Teatret, Copenhagen. A tribute to the hip hop culture with some of the world’s best dancers and rappers.

Øen i Øst / The Island in the East
(2005)
Appel Theatre, Shin Juku, Kabuki Town, Tokyo

Slumprinsessen og De 7 Smalltime Hustlers / The Slum Princess and the 7 Smalltime Hustlers
(2005) Aarhus Theatre
Free-style version of the Grimm fairytale of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Nøddeknækkeren / The Nutcracker
(2003)
Reumert-award 2003 – repremiered in 2004 and 2005. New repremiere in Oslo and in Tivoli, Copgenhagen, 2007.
Harlekins Triumf (The Triumph of Harquin)(2003)
The Pantomime Theatre, Tivoli (Copenhagen).

11 komma 7 / 11 point 7
(2002)
With Clemens and Al Agami. Directed by Peter Langdal at Edison/Betty Nansen Teatret.

Reviews Extracts

”Really cool. Columbine wriggles up Harlequin in the same reptilian way Harlequin’s tatoo snakes up his left arm. The muscles are tense beneath Harlequin’s black skin, as slender Columbine with a delicate  British pallor reaches Harlequin’s frizzled aborigine top Black and white at odds. Two languages. Two cultures. Two social classes.”
Politiken (DK), Harlekins Triumf

“Vibrant, entertaining and breath-taking dance performance for the whole family.  We sat there on the edge of our seats in sheer amazement and just got blown away.”
The Reumert committee on naming The Nutcracker the best dance performance of 2004