by MARITES CARINO

Although Alexandra L’Heureux’s life revolves around dance, she came close to ditching the discipline entirely a few years ago, disillusioned with the contemporary dance scene.

“Aesthetically, the movements never really appealed to me,” she confesses. “I really felt like if you were a modern dancer, you had to open your cuts and show them bleeding on stage.”

Instead, L’Heureux, who graduated from UQÀM’s dance program in 2000, opts for a more tongue-in-cheek approach to her creations, making her mark with a theatrical show Le Specquetacle, which is driven by a playful joie de vivre. “I also wanted to quit dance because I was moving towards theatre. It was like I had nothing else left to say with movement.”

After a period of questioning whether to turn her back on the artform, L’Heureux snapped out of her funk and found something else to say by jumping headfirst into the world of hip hop. During this transition, she crossed paths with street dancer and krumper Otis Hopson, the beginning of a collaboration that would lead them to form BWH2—a dynamic, young hip hop troupe made up of dancers from age 12–25 who recently gave Montreal a taste of krumping.

Interest in the high-energy style known as krumping, a mix of clowning and dance that had its beginnings in California, has been growing since the release of Rize, a doc that chronicles its history. As for the moves, L’Heureux describes them as “tribal, but more aggressive, with hip hop and tricks in between combined with arm swings, stomps and chest pops.” L’Heureux and Hopson are promoting the cathartic style by offering classes to get the moves out. “We want to develop a krumping scene and want to introduce krump battles in Montreal because it doesn’t exist yet,” she says.

Besides scoring great abs, there exists a deeper motivation to krump. “It’s used to express your feelings about something or someone and it’s a way of getting out aggression without fighting,” says L’Heureux. “Teens now go through a lot of violence—more than we do—so it’s a style they can relate to.”