In Underdogs, three dancers – one woman and two men – attempt to stick together to explore the political symbols and social markers of the urban collective unconscious that unites them. By going through the postures, gestures and energies that suffuse hip-hop dance, they express their personal and emotional bonds to their own dance’s etymology, rooting popping and waacking in the political and social context in which they were born. Against a backdrop of soul music evocative of the political climate in 1970s America, the dancers paint a vivid picture of movements of resistance against oppression. The explosive energy of their bodies anchors in the rebelliousness of popular uprisings for the cause of the underestimated, the marginalised in our society – the ‘underdogs’ – transforming transgression into a creative gesture.

Underdogs are those who are expected to lose, never a safe bet. They’re the ones who meld seamlessly with the urban landscape, on whom our gaze settles but never dares to linger.

Urban social dances, amongst which popping, locking and waacking, which are staged in Underdogs, are fueled by everything that challenges the norms, drawing their inspiration from the postures, gestures and energies of outlier characters. Underdogs explores the way in which our bodies are shot through with urban imagery and the traces this leaves behind, reminding us of the essence of hip-hop culture, where gesture is above all a symbol, the body an object of assertion, and movement a vital necessity.