Kim Brandstrup’s Breaking Bach (News Feature)

Breaking Bach, soon to premiere at the Edinburgh Festival, is Kim Brandstrup’s marriage of Bach and Hip Hop

The sophisticated Baroque music of Johann Sebastian Bach, and hip hop, the gritty street dance born of the disaffection of contemporary urban youth. You might think they stand as polar opposites in our cultural spectrum. Yet look closer and you’ll find they have enough in common to make for a very happy marriage. Who knew?

Kim Brandstrup knew.

Kim Brandstup. Photo: Zen Grisdale

The veteran London-based Danish choreographer, whose ever daring, inventive and elegant choreography has graced innumerable international stages, is embarking on perhaps his most audacious project yet, Breaking Bach – a one-hour long hip hop show, danced to a selection of Bach pieces played live by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (OAE) by a mixed cast of eight professional dancers and five pupils from the Acland Burghley School in North London, one of the three vectors of this collaboration, alongside Kim Brandstrup and the OAE.

It will premiere at the 2025 Edinburgh International Festival, but I was privileged to attend a rehearsal and a preview, and I have to say, I hadn’t felt so thrilled and energised in a very long time.

The key to the collaboration, Brandstrup told me, is the “rhythmic literacy” of hip hop dancers.

“What is wonderful is that it’s not important that the music is 400 years old – the rhythm is what guides them. I mean, it’s the most beautiful music in the world, but it’s also very tangible, very tactile and it affects everybody. So, I think that’s been the excitement of it.”

Fitting hip hop, or break dance, moves into Bach’s intricate structures wasn’t easy at first, Jeriah Kebusi and Emmanuel Bruno told me. Both 14-years-old and school pupils, they are already seasoned performers, but neither was familiar with Bach. At first, it was difficult to find “the pockets in the music”, they said; but after a little while there was what Jeriah called “a reset”, which led him to look at dance from a different perspective and improved his musicality.

Kim Brandstrup’s Breaking Bach in rehearsal. Photo: Zen Grisdale

The Road to Breaking Bach

Over his prolific career Kim Brandstrup has worked with dancers from a variety of disciplines, from ballet to contemporary and more besides. He also included hip hop dancers in his choreographies for both the 2009 Glyndebourne production of Henry Purcell’s opera The Faerie Queen, and Deborah Warner’s 2012 staging of Handel’s The Messiah for Opéra National de Lyon.

And he choreographed on Bach’s music, too, most notably the ‘Goldberg Variations’, widely considered one of the composer’s greatest keyboard works, for his ballet Goldberg, performed at the ROH Linbury theatre in 2009 to rapturous acclaim. “A mini-masterpiece”, according to the Daily Telegraph; “a choreographic gem”, said Dance Magazine, US. And for the Arts Desk it was “a beautiful, grown-up piece of fine musical feeling and drama. Elegant, atmospheric, ingeniously skilled.”

An Olivier Award for Most Outstanding Achievement in Dance followed.

Joining the Dots

The idea of joining the dots, Kim Brandstrup told me, came during a six-month Fellowship at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University.

“I wanted to research and write something, so I went there and worked with some lovely dancers from New York City Ballet and Juilliard. And there was a group of hip hop dancers – I did workshops and they were really good.

“It has to do with the speed at which they access the music. They hear the really fast subdivision of the music, rather than one… two… Ballet has a much slower pace. And suddenly I felt, oh there’s something here that I can do, that I couldn’t do before with other types of dancers.”

Breaking Bach has been in the works for a couple of years. Workshops with hip hop dancer extraordinaire Deavion Brown, and the co-winner of the Critics Circle Award for Best Male Dancer 2025 Tommy Franzen, a regular Brandstrup collaborator, culminated in a small scale, closed studio production. Then a fortuitous encounter took the project further.

“I met Crispin [Woodhead, CEO of Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment] and he said, ‘what are you doing?’ And I said, I’’m working on some Bach, the Double Violin Concerto’. And then he got very alert and said, ‘why don’t we try and do it together?’”

OAE is based at the Acland Burghley School in north London, an impressive educational institution where the arts are very much part of the curriculum, and thus the triangle that would result in Breaking Bach was completed.

Rhythm Rules OK?

Interestingly, the steps of Breaking Bach weren’t set to the music itself, but rather to the rhythm.

“My experience when working with them is not to give them musical prompts”, Brandstrup explained. “I would paraphrase the music – tcha-ka-ta-ka-ta, ya-ka-ta-ka-ta – so they responded purely rhythmically, because I know as soon as they hear violins they click into the concept of ballet – standing still on every two beats” (he laughs).

“So, once they’ve made some material – and I do draw on what they’ve come up with in response to that rhythmic chant – then I play the music and suddenly they hear the music in a different way.”

Just as Jeriah had told me, in fact.

The result is an exhilarating performance, the energy of which never flags, though that’s not to say there’s no light and shade – there is – or that he orchestra plays second fiddle to the dancers – it doesn’t, on the contrary it’s very much present.

The dialogue between the surge of Bach’s music, its crystalline cascades of notes and lightning quick subdivisions and a kind of stylised hip hop dancing is mesmerising and revelatory – truly a marriage made in heaven. Who knew?

(Banner image credit: Kim Brandstrup’s Breaking Bach in rehearsal. Photo: Zen Grisdale)

Breaking Back premieres at the Edinburgh International Festival on 20 August 2025.

A further performance will take place art the George Enescu International Festival in Bucharest, Romania, on 11 September 2025

The show can be streamed on Marquee Arts TV