Kentaro!! | SONORE

Kentaro!! surprised everyone at Yokohama Dance Collection R 2008, by walking away with the French Embassy Prize for Young Choreographers. He also snapped up both the Audience Award and the Nextage Special Award in the Toyota Choreography Award 2008. All died hair, skateboarder clothes and false nonchalance, Kentaro!! is a young dancer blurring the edges in the Tokyo contemporary dance world. “Direct expressivity” or “crude spirituality”; the critics are still struggling to define this new phenomenon. Totally imbibed in urban electro culture, Kentaro!! hasn’t put a step wrong over the last few months, dancing in all the right places.

He got bitten young, watching the TV show “Dance Koshien”, Takeshi Kitano presenting a high school street dance competition. Kentaro!! was only 11 but made his decision. He trained endlessly in front of a video of Michael Jackson, imitating moves in front of the telly. At the beginning of the 1990s, hip-hop and breakbeat had only just been introduced into Japan. Kentaro!! found his way to the only studio in Tokyo giving classes in hip-hop. Eager to learn, he also took house and lock dance classes; he was 13.

He quickly assimilated the different techniques. During his teens his tastes matured as he mined this American genre, getting to know more New York hip-hop: Jungle Brothers, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest. He also saw that he had to find his own style. Kentaro!! wasn’t an African American from the projects. He was Japanese and he had to learn how to use his own physique, his build.

Kentaro!! mixes hip-hop with a sort of Japanese spirituality. He adapts rap motifs and moves into the dance without ever losing sight of who he is. Very acute musically, with faultless technique, he projects his body into the mix. Electro, pop rock, hip-hop, he doesn’t simply use the beats as a canvas; his moves are extreme and penetrate the music like a needle on the record.