Co-Presented with Tri-C Performing Arts
Challenging the range of what hip-hop dance can be, Raphael Xavier will conclude our 2024-2025 Season at Cuyahoga Community College with a performance titled Skiff. The hour-long work features Xavier and guest artists, including some of Northeast Ohio’s own dancers, in a unique piece that explores the aging body, race, privilege, and power while encouraging conversations of identity, legacy and lineage.
A 53-year-old breaker and choreographer, Xavier contextualizes the work through the lens of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, the classic novel about a fisherman’s relentless battle with a giant marlin. With original text and spoken word interwoven with Hemingway’s text, Xavier draws parallels between the fisherman’s search and his own journey to build a dance career utilizing the artform of Breaking. In addition to the novel, Skiff also draws inspiration from 19th century American painter Winslow Homer’s “The Gulf Stream,” the iconic painting of a Black man in a small, rudderless fishing boat engulfed by a restless sea as sharks circle below.
Xavier has been awarded numerous accolades including a 2013 Pew Fellowship, a MacDowell Fellow in 2014, a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship for Choreography among others.
“...Xavier captivated his audience with the impassioned lyrical delivery of a hip-hop artist.” - The Broad Street Review