Dance review: Ebnflōh Dance Company playfully flips the tables on witness and witnessed
In hip-hop-charged La Probabilité du Néant, the company and its DJ build restless crowd scenes and lock eyes with the audience
Photo by David Wong
The Dance Centre presents Ebnflōh Dance Company’s La Probabilité du Néant at the Scotiabank Dance Centre to December 9
A CROWD OF URBANITES stands fixated, looking intently into a spotlight off the side of the stage, like they’re bystanders to an accident. Or a fight. Or some disaster. But then slowly, glitchily, they start to turn their heads, locking their stare at us, the audience—some fiercely, some curiously, some in horror. The magnetic Ja James “Jigsaw” Britton Johnson even cocks his head and points an accusatory finger.
In La Probabilité du Néant, showing at the Scotiabank Dance Centre this weekend, Montreal’s hip-hop-based Ebnflōh Dance Company makes sophisticated play with the question of who is the watcher and who is being watched.
In her most ambitious piece yet, choreographer Alexandra “Spicey” Landé builds a highly conceptual, ever-moving world of shifting urban scenarios. For those who caught the company’s debut here, In-Ward in 2022, this show is a departure from more structured narrative vignettes into a realm that is enigmatically expressionistic.
This is not hip-hop obsessed with showing off mad skills (though these dancers have serious break and pop-and-lock chops). And it’s not about addressing issues literally or head-on. In many ways you could compare it to the January debut of French-Malian artist Smail Kanouté’s Never Twenty One, which came to the same venue during the last PuSh Festival. Where Kanouté mixed street-dance languages to explore urban violence, Landé seems interested in some of the same issues—but her touchstones are less literal: she focuses on how we internalize the effects of being watched, or the experience of witnessing something we feel unable, or paralyzed, to confront. The conflicted feelings of being a bystander. Bodies recoil, hands rise to cover faces and eyes, mouths pull into “Os” of shock, dancers flex and trash talk. Some try to strut and stay composed, others convulse against the intensity of it all.
But just when you’re witnessing them witness, the crew turns the tables, implicating us as bystanders—or consumers of what’s going on. We can’t shrug it all off as, to paraphrase the title, “probably nothing”. At one point a dancer even asks us directly, “Are you okay? Are you being entertained?”
What Landé and her dancers excel at is conjuring the lived intensity and chaos of these times—the mess of being lost in a crowd, fighting to be heard, losing control, and having to constantly keep your guard up. The opening segment features the dancers spread horizontally across the stage, each moving toward us and back again in various states of reaction—some tease and provoke, some fidget and worry, some shrug, some jerk in distress.
True to the company’s name, these individual experiences and movement styles flow together to an effect that’s greater than the sum of its parts. The stage feels fuller and busier than it normally does with this many dancers. It also feels restlessly human.
Landé highlights the individuality of her dancers, whether that’s Nindy Banks's small, frenzied idiosyncrasies, or Jaleesa “Tealeaf” Coligny’s intense facial expressions—a kind of dance all its own.
A huge part of creating the vivid feel of La Probabilité du Néant is live composer-DJ Richard ‘Shash’U’ St-Aubin, who samples moods and lyrics in the same way the dancers mix and layer experiences. His soundscape of monster beats, rap segments, and haunting cinematic interludes are worth the price of admission alone. You can feel the dancers build off his energy in a way that feels authentic to street forms—and that energy spreads to the audience.
In fact, that's what differentiates Ebnflōh from so much other hip-hop-derived contemporary dance: it stays deeply, rawly authentic to its street roots while venturing into the more abstract thematic territory of contemporary dance. The company keeps it real—and it's something to witness.
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