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Preview: Break Out!, Peacock Theatre, London

Get down to jailhouse body-rock

Charlotte Cripps
Monday 09 April 2007 00:00 BST
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A body-popping posse of nuns, nurses and villains are coming to London, in a Korean break-dancing troupe's slapstick production about inmates escaping from jail. This new show, which also includes gymnastics, martial arts and yoga, is presented by the same creative team, SevenSense and Ye Gam Theatre, behind the comic martial-arts hit Jump, currently on at Sadler's Wells.

Cast member Jin-Sung Park joined the company in October 2006. He plays Joker, a role that requires highly skilled B-boying. "I break-dance on a car and on beds in the hospital scene," says Park. "I perform five different extreme dance moves in this show: Top Rock, Up Rock, Freeze, Foot Work and Power Move. The Power Move is the most complicated and dangerous. It combines several different dance moves including a head-spin, a windmill, a flare and an air-track."

Park, now 23, belongs to various B-boy crews. He says: "I became a B-boy when I first saw the boy band Seo Tai-ji and Boys, which was the first B-boy K-Pop idol group in Korea, when I was in the sixth-grade at elementary school."

The show's artistic director, Won-Kil Paek, picked only the best Korean B-boys to perform in his show. "B-boy performances are booming in Korea," says Paek, "but I think they focus too much on B-boying itself, rather than drama, to stimulate teenagers' interest. We train our dancers in acting rather than dancing - their skill is almost perfect already. The show doesn't have a complex plot. It is like reading a fun comic book because is bursting with non-stop activity."

The starting point for the show is when the prisoners receive a sacred text that mysteriously drops into the prison. It inspires them to plan an escape, in a bid to enjoy "a brief moment of freedom". "Street dance has always inspired me, as street dancers want to find freedom and escape from the real world," says Paek. "We wanted to make a show focused on the original nature of mankind, which is to be free."

19-22 April (www.sadlers wells.com; 08444 124 300)

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