Red Bull Flying Bach Breaks It Down

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INTERVIEW: THE FLYING STEPS

The Flying Steps was formed in Berlin in the 1990s, but soon gained international attention for their popping & locking and break dancing skills, winning the Battle of the Year and Red Bull Beat Battle competitions two times each. They’ve grown into arguably the most successful urban dance crew ever with a dance academy, their own music label and, now, the Red Bull Flying Bach tour, which is taking them and their art around the world.



Flying Steps crew members Vartan, Mikel and KC-1 might have more in common with Johann Sebastian Bach than you think. They give us their take on the famous composer’s music, and the artistic struggles that they face as performers, many of which Bach faced centuries ago.

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The music for Red Bull Flying Bach is more like what you’d hear in a concert hall, not something you’d typically see pumped from a ghetto-blaster during a breakdance session. What was your initial attitude when you first heard Johann Sebastian Bach’s music?



Vartan: When Christoph Hagel played his music to us for the first time, we’d hardly listened to it before and certainly had never danced to it. I guess our attitude was open and curious.


KC-1: We might have heard his best-known piece ‘Toccata’ with The Count in Sesame Street when we were kids. Or as a ringtone, but that’s about it.

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And now you have incorporated Bach into your musical lineage?



Mikel: We have accepted his music as a necessary part of our group and of our Flying Bach performances.



Vartan: We were visiting a library in Berlin a few years ago, to have a look at Bach’s handwritten sheets of music — including the Well-Tempered Clavier. We were told that it was his children’s duty to write down and copy his compositions.



KC-1: Imagine; we saw more than 800 pieces of his work in that library. He wrote 800 pieces, and we had only ever heard of two or three of them. We’ve definitely come a long way when it comes to our understanding of his music.

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Obviously your respect towards Bach is still growing…



Mikel: All the time. When we visited the Bach-Festival in Leipzig, we also visited Bach’s grave. He opened us up to new ways to present ourselves. We were just street-dancers before working to his music and now we surprise people unlike any other group.



KC-1: We learned that Bach actually “battled” with his music in a similar way as we do today. In 1717, he travelled to Dresden to listen to Louis Marchand, one of the best organists of his time. Supposedly, an organ-battle between the two was arranged but Marchand ended up fleeing town after he heard Bach rehearsing. We like to think we’d have the same impact on our competitors today!

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It’s said that Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” was designed as a form of training for youth eager to study music. Do you think breakdancing and Red Bull Flying Bach shows applies to B-Boys in this way, too?



Vartan: Definitely. Bach created a new kind of mathematics with notes, and it’s quite similar to breakdance. We sum up a lot of small steps and moves to create something bigger. We hope the new format and classical music of our shows prove to B-Boys that they can push boundaries with their battles, too.



Mikel: We like to think that we share Bach’s battle-spirit. To us, battling just means confronting each other in an artistic way.

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Obviously not everyone appreciates that inventiveness. Bach’s lust for experimentation got him into trouble from time to time. He was criticised for allegedly bewildering church-goers with his strange interludes, decorations and modulations. Any similar criticism on your end?



Mikel: Sure, I don’t think breakdance was widely accepted in any country at the beginning. Some people called it an aberration. I guess in some ways it’s true; breakdance was and is still about transgressing the norms of society in many ways. We dance as we like and we do break many rules of traditional dance. Absolutely.

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If you could pose a question to Bach…what would you ask?



Mikel: I’m dying to know what he’d think about B-Boys and breakdancing. He’s been an inspiration to our work, but would our performances inspire him? I like to think so. I hope they would.

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Glenn Gould once said, “Bach was the greatest non-conformist in the history of music“.



Vartan: I heard that he was open to everything new. He just gave it a try. That kind of experimental attitude is what we try to bring to audiences at our shows. We try to surprise them with a performance that is totally new.



KC-1: I think Bach would get tons of inspiration from today’s music. He’d probably write even crazier stuff… imagine if he got to work with someone like Pharell, or hip hop grandfather Afrika Bambaataa, who put Beethoven, Kraftwerk and James Brown in the same mix…

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With such a powerful performance drawing international appeal and breathing fresh life into his music, there’s no way Bach is rolling over in his grave…but he might be working on his head spin.

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Bach made big sacrifices to further his art. As a young musician, it’s said he sometimes walked from Lüneburg to Hamburg to watch renowned organists play. How have the Flying Steps sacrificed to further your dreams?



Mikel: When we first started, we would all save up gas money to drive to battles in other parts of Germany.



Vartan: Yeah, we would battle and then drive right home, just to improve and elaborate on our moves. Presenting ourselves is one thing. Learning from our competitors is a whole other.



KC-1: Incorporating new moves is important to us as we tour. As in most forms of art, there is a rule amongst us breakdancers about copying; never bite or copy something without changing it. You have to turn it into your own creation.As an art form, breakdance is not that old (James Brown was laying the foundation in the ’70s), at least not compared to the music of Bach. Still, it captures the same timeless feel that other forms of dance do. It’s poetic in its movements, subtle or extreme.