Hip-hop dance is usually consumed in brief bursts, like fireworks exploding in the middle of a music video. And concert dance shows are mostly produced by nonprofit arts organizations for just a few performances. Keone and Mari Madrid are challenging both conventions with “Beyond Babel,” an evening-length hip-hop dance drama that they’ve created and star in. The show begins previews this week and opens Feb. 1 for a remarkably ambitious two-month commercial run Off Broadway.
The show uses “Romeo and Juliet” as a rough template for the story of a community divided by a wall, told through vignettes of urban dance set to an eclectic pop score. The Madrids are not the first to fill an evening with hip-hop, of course, and not even the first to filter it through Shakespeare (see Rennie Harris’s 20-year-old “Rome and Jewels”), but their gamble is that their personal style, born in the West Coast dance industry, can turn a profit in New York.
The Madrids, a married couple, have a strong track record of finding an audience. In November 2015, they were given just one day to choreograph the music video for Justin Bieber’s ballad “Love Yourself,” which they also starred in. There were few parameters.
“For the most part, it was ‘do your thing,’” Mr. Madrid said recently. So, they did their thing, which is to convey a heartfelt narrative in mere minutes through quick, quirky gestures that look complicated but also, somehow, familiar. The Bieber video, posted two days after it was made, has been watched by 1.5 billion people.
The Madrids gained more admirers in 2017 as contestants on Jennifer Lopez’s TV competition “World of Dance,” progressing through several rounds before losing to the eventual champions. Their animated routines told simple, sweet stories with a healthy dose of humor in the staccato, hip-hop-inspired style they call urban dance, preferring it to the derided term “lyrical hip-hop.” Last year, their work was featured on Billie Eilish’s tour.
In each case, their gift for physical storytelling had to fit into short time slots. Working for years within this framework, the Madrids have even found creative ways to make statements on relationships and social issues — like a succinct dance about refugees inspired by their grandparents, immigrants from the Philippines.
Recently, though, they’ve sought platforms to make longer, more in-depth pieces. “We’ve been so great at telling stories in a vacuum — the 90-second or 5-minute format,” Mr. Madrid said. “How do we do it for 90 minutes?”
“Beyond Babel” is their first big try. In San Diego, where the show premiered in fall 2018, it was extended twice over six months and played for 125 performances. The New York run will be at the Gym at Judson Church in Greenwich Village.
At a recent rehearsal there, with the Madrids’ 5-month-old daughter looking on, the dancers ran through a section full of silky grooves and sharp, synchronized popping and locking. The abrupt shifts in speed and dynamics were so striking at times that it seemed as if someone were pressing “slow motion” or “fast forward” on a remote control.
“Let’s not musicalize the reaction,” Mr. Madrid told the dancers, who were responding to a dramatic moment in the story. “More emotion than physicalization.”
That’s a shift the Madrids had to make themselves as their interest turned to storytelling. From influences like Gene Kelly and Michael Jackson, they’ve learned that small, idiosyncratic details can imbue an extravagant movement with an approachable warmth and specificity. To illustrate, Mr. Madrid slid his palm down his cheek, a slight motion that suddenly introduced an idea of tenderness and individuality into the mix of their muscular unison choreography.
Incorporating such subtleties, and thinking about things like character and drama were a challenge for some “Beyond Babel” performers, who are usually focused on hitting beats. “Some of our dancers just want to be a dancer all the time,” Ms. Madrid said, which, in the urban dance world, means working at precision. “Sometimes they just need to be a human” — to connect to the story, not just the rhythm.
One way the dancers have connected to the story in “Beyond Babel” is by considering the walls and borders in their own lives. Mexico’s proximity to San Diego, where many of them live, including the Madrids, has made those issues starkly visible. Early in rehearsals, the cast visited the nearby border wall, recently reinforced with steel, an experience Ms. Madrid found difficult yet helpful. “To be able to speak on the things that we want to, I think it’s important that we stay connected to that.”
In San Diego, the show was performed in the Barrio Logan neighborhood, a nexus of the city’s Mexican-American population. A former boxing ring was converted into a working theater by the New York producers Lyndsay Magid Aviner and Josh Aviner, who conceived and created “Beyond Babel” with the Madrids. The pair, also married, discovered the Madrids through YouTube videos of their classes and choreography and recruited them for a circus project in 2016 in Brooklyn. (The Aviners production company is called Hideaway Circus.)
“Keone and Mari instantly knew how to make those guys tell stories,” Mr. Aviner said of the circus artists. The Aviners wanted to collaborate with the Madrids again and felt a similar genre-expanding opportunity with urban dance.
“There’s a massive hole,” Ms. Aviner said of the lack of urban dance on New York stages. Coming from the circus world, the Aviners said they believe there’s a broad audience for physical storytelling. Justin Peck’s popular 2017 work “The Times Are Racing” for New York City Ballet, danced in sneakers, convinced them that audiences would embrace the kind of work the Madrids are doing. Taking a cue from movement-based hits like “Blue Man Group,” “Stomp” and “Fuerza Bruta,” the Aviners went the for-profit route. They said they raised $200,000 for the San Diego run, then held their breath.
“If the show hadn’t sold enough tickets after the first performance, we wouldn’t have been able to pay people,” Mr. Aviner said. But audiences showed up. With an additional budget of $250,000, the creative team said they set their sights on New York, which had always been the goal. Why not Los Angeles, the center of the commercial dance industry and a city where the Madrids are already known? “I mean, this is where the heart of theater is,” Ms. Madrid said.
One objective for the Madrids in New York is to pave the way for more opportunities for hip-hop and urban dancers to apply their skills in long-form, long-running projects. Another is to claim a place for urban dance in the city’s concert dance scene. (The Madrids will also make a claim in Chicago this spring as the choreographers of “Once Upon a One More Time,” a new musical with Broadway ambitions set to Britney Spears songs.)
And then there’s the desire to push their form of dance forward. “It’s always about learning and growing,” Mr. Madrid said of their eclectic list of projects. “We’ve honed this craft of urban movement. How can we elevate it?”
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