IN PROCESS: 30 rounds

Grounded in the practice of breaking, Arian Šajina explores one of the discipline's emerging rituals: 30 ROUNDS. Arian's practice treats theatre as a space that holds and endures questions, shaped by a movement vocabulary rooted in breaking, and by his position as someone who entered performing arts from its periphery.

The narrative around aging in breaking is still forming. For young breakers, progress means expanding what the body can do - but it remains uncharted what new meanings a deepening of one's practice can acquire once the body's range of motion and strain begin to contract. One emerging age-related ritual is that upon turning 30, a breaker battles their peers for 30 consecutive exchanges of improvised dance phrases: they do 30 rounds. Since a round is usually a physically intense phrase lasting about half a minute, and repetition is considered taboo, doing 30 rounds demonstrates maturity of practice and functions as a rite of passage to eldership.

At HAUT, Arian will explore the preparation for this rite of passage as an experimental process that treats the studio as both practice spot and stage laboratory.

ABOUT BREAKING

Breaking is a dance form and subculture that emerged from the Hip Hop block party environment of the 1970s in the Black and Puerto Rican communities in the Bronx, New York. Its early influences range from jazz, tap, and salsa to Cossack dance, gymnastics, and Kung Fu movies. In terms of performance, breaking draws heavily from African American traditions of call and response and the cypher: a circle of dancers where each dancer takes a turn to dance. Since then, breaking has spread across the globe, entered popular culture, expanded its movement vocabulary, and codified its norms and aesthetics. Today it is held in tension between commercial competitions, underground jams, professional athleticism, and stage translation.