Gadfly is one of Toronto’s leading urban dance repertory companies. Established in 2006 by Apolonia Velasquez and Ofilio Sinbadinho, the company aims to give visibility to the city’s underrepresented street dance community.

Since its inception, their intricately choreographed productions have earned them numerous accolades, including a highly coveted Dora Award, and a Manifesto Award for Innovation & Originality.

On April 25, they bring their latest production, UNBXBL 2, to the Free Concert Series in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre. Ahead of their performance, Ofilio talked to the COC about his love for urban dance, upcoming projects and the future of Gadfly.

COC: What can the audience expect to see during your Free Concert Series performance?

OS: They can expect to see things that they are familiar with… things that they will relate to... things that they might have seen and would like to connect to, such as contemporary dance, urban dance, ballet, jazz, tap, Latin dances… but we are not doing those styles. We like to take techniques. We like to take concepts from those dances and take other things, let’s say personalities, characters, stories, and just consider it as movement. So what we’ll see is movement used for the sake of creativity, for the sake of moving people and making them feel something. In short, they will see excerpts from two of our pieces that we will be performing during our production of UNBXBL from May 3-5. And they will also see what we call “DNA Decoded”, which is just a short, live creation process.  We will create a piece in front of the audience and hopefully it will be good.

COC: What other exciting projects do you have coming up?

OS: The main project is the UNBXBL production, presented by Danceworks Series at Harbourfront Theatre, happening on May 3, 4, and 5  this is the main project. If we survive this project, we’ll let you know what’s coming up next.

COC: How did you and Apolonia Velasquez come together to form Gadfly?

OS: The idea came around the end of 2006/beginning of 2007. We realized that there were a lot of really great dancers here who had been training for a really long time. There were no opportunities in Toronto for street dancers to showcase their craft, to send their message, or just to be seen. The best thing that you could do back then was just hope for a music video, and at the end of that you’ll be seen for one second, two seconds. There were no shows. There were no companies for urban dance. We asked eight dancers that we knew, who were really, really good, and who we looked up to. Most of them they were specialists in urban dance styles. They all said yes, surprisingly. We just asked them once – they said yes. We asked them if they wanted to be a part of a production, then we’ll try to do it. Then we told them that we’ve never choreographed a big thing like that, but if you trust us, hopefully it’s going to be good. And they said yes. We did our first show. It was a part of a fringe festival. We had a couple of sold out performances and that just gave us the momentum to keep going.

 

COC: As collaborators, what’s your choreography process like?

OS: Every time we enter a studio, it’s different. The main reason is we want to outdo or do something different than what we’ve done before. There’s no point of always repeating and recreating the same thing and using the same formula, so we try to approach it from different angles where it is movement-based, where it is movement created on the spot, or movement that we prepare ahead of time. Where it is for music, sometimes music doesn’t show up five weeks after we’ve started rehearsals and sometimes it’s not right from the first day. All the time, though, the underlying thing is, we always try to consider what the dancers have to offer; not just the technique, but mostly their personality, their style, and that affects a lot. We have baggage as artists and they have baggage as artists, and what comes out is better, because we don’t know what’s going to come out and from there we pick what makes more sense.

 

COC: What do you love most about urban dance?

OS: I grew up training in urban dance. Gadfly was formed to push urban dance. We made a festival called TUDS Urban Dance Festival for eight years to push urban dance. And that will always be our roots. But now I think there’s a bigger picture that we live for, which is creativity, and the three things we extracted from urban dance that we keep doing all the time. What we do, we don’t call it urban dance anymore  - it’s just Gadfly, I think. Now we started calling it “Aybrid” movement.

The three elements that we took from urban dance that we use in everything we do are: artistry, authenticity, athleticism. Creativity comes first. Try to be original. Try to be different. Try to express yourself. Authenticity has to come from the guts, it has to come from a human place, from feeling – either from the dancers or from us, but it cannot just be synthetic. And athleticism is, yeah, let’s push the body, let’s see what else we can do with it, what else has been done with it, and if it has been done this way. Can we do it the other way? And why not do it this way? These are the three main things that form our creativity when it comes to movement.

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Credit: Kevin Lloyd (2014).