'Sneaker Suites' at PIFA: Overlong, too-earnest hip-hop dance

A ntics Performance Group is a Los Angeles hip-hop company, founded by Artistic Director, Amy "Catfox" Campion in 2007. It wrapped up the dance performances of this year's PIFA festival at the Perelman Theater on Wednesday evening in a production titled Sneaker Suites.

The genre of hip-hop dance has been evolving in Philly over the last 25 years under giants in the field like the imaginative Rennie Harris, the elegant and political D. Sabela Grimes, or the rocketing power of Ron Wood and PEW Fellow and Guggenheim awardee and conceptualist Raphael Xavier. If you've seen them, you've been wondering, "what are they thinking out there in LaLaLand?"

It seems that all Antics Performance Group are thinking about is sneakers. The group riffed on the brands, the colors, how they match the rest of your outfit, how to keep them spotlessly clean (which they do nightly), how not to crack or damage them. In one of the overlong though humorous videos during the show, we hear it called Sneakers 101. The only thing left out was how they smelled after a day on the street.

Through long, earnest soliloquies, you learn why sneakers tossed up on a wire are not like birds on a wire, but the mundane reasons escape me. You can't tell who the speaker is because there were not only no program notes, but also no company bios or photos on their website. But wee-hour e-mails gave me John "Black Magick the Savage" Liggins as the main speaker and Ebonee Le'Triece (with the whipping black hair) as the dancer in hot pink high heels, in which she did spectacular backflips.

While this performance group calls itself dance theater, I'll accept theater - but only two or three of the eight performers looked as if they had much in the way of dance chops. By that, I mean most of the performances looked like circus tricks or gymnastics, with not much kinetic artistry or technical discipline. The pace of the show was sluggish at best, with smatterings of brief headspins, versions of coffee-grinders, and a little popping and locking.

The best actual dancing came in the synchronized group sections, with a little drill team tucked in here and there. The e-mail also said Stephen Velazquez performed the "Virgin of Guadalupe" solo in the second piece, Footsteps, and I couldn't help focusing on him.

The sneaker theme began to sound like nostalgia for this Nike or that pair of Adidas. Maybe in their next work, Antic will try to work less on footwear and more on footwork.