JAM

Are you joining the dance, or do you just want to watch?

JAM is an outdoor pop-up performance with dancers from the club and street dance culture, known for being social and inclusive. The performance explores and challenges the boundaries between dance as an art form and social dance, based on the club and street dance culture. What is dance? Who defines what dance art is, and who is represented on stage? Who feels a sense of belonging to dance art?

JAM can be experienced up close or from afar, for ten seconds or 45 minutes. As an audience member, you choose whether you want to watch or participate.

In JAM they have worked collectively to find methods and structures that are based on the knowledge we already have from club and street dance. Their practice is to dance/jam together, clubbing, dancing in cyphers, battle. In all these spaces, their own codes have emerged over a long time; ways of reading the space, ways of relating to music, dance partners and other people. In the project they want to define street dance as an art form based on itself, without necessarily having to use methods from dance genres that are created for the stage.

All the artists in the project have connections to the club/street dance culture and are used to dancing together, exchanging and including others. Several of the performers have mainly experience through clubbing and battles, and some also have broad experience in the performing arts. This is a combination of expertise that is very important for the project, because it should be experienced as both a performance and a jam, depending on what references you have.

Supported by the Directorate of Culture, the Norwegian Sound and Vision Fund, the Norwegian Performing Artists Fund and the City of Oslo.