Storm | 28 Years in 28 Minutes

A solo by Storm

solo |

dance |

video

Creation 2011

Running time: 28 minutes

Suitable to all audiences

How do you sum up 28 years in 28 minutes? How do you present the life of a dancer on stage: how do you put words to dance?

In 28 Years in 28 Minutes, Storm shows his past as a moving photo album. He speaks about the small choices that had great consequences. The Berlin-based choreographer evokes his childhood in Northern Germany, his family and describes his quest for identity, so intrinsically linked with German history: growing up in the ’70’s, in a country trying to digest its past and renouncing anything related to it, rejecting any German singularity whatsoever. The emptiness had to be filled, a new space for a dream world, inhabited by superheroes with superhuman powers.

Storm’s story and hiphop’s story are similar: creating something new from nothing, transforming ugliness into something beautiful. For his generation, such films as Beatstreet and Style Wars weren’t fiction. They were taken at face value, as undeniable facts.

The first trip to New York was a wake-up call. The reality had nothing to do with the way the idols were portrayed. What they had created themselves, this dream world, was already so concrete that it had become reality. This great passion stood alone without needing to look any further.

Hiphop techniques merited superhero power. Through this culture, enthusiasts could come together. The hiphop philosophy had its own ideals far from the ideology of the German past.

This school of life shaped Storm and allowed him to live, disappointments and twists of fate as challenges and as possibilities for renewal. It wouldn’t have been possible without this ability to create his own reality, stigmatized by others as being a pipe dream: creativity as a means of survival.

Storm explains it in these terms: “I control my addictive tendancy and use it in a constructive way.”