KLAPPING

In 2018, Ahilan Ratnamohan (a.k.a. Maestro Ahil) and Feras Shaheen invented a new streetdance/urban dance called ‘klapping’. They launched it in various cities, during festivals and residencies. Inspired by krump, jerking, Chicago footwork, house, and breaking, they carefully deconstructed the movements, vocabulary, music and fasion styles, power structures, and historiography that constitute the soul of such subcultures. But rather than being based in street culture, klapping is based in football. It is a different conception of football might be: a dance that build communities.

This season, Maestro Ahil's KlappSquad is continuing the klapping movement in Brussels. Through dance, music, and fashion workshops, he seeks to anchor this self-created subculture in the city. In three 'Klapping Initiations', later in the season, you can experience this new form of dance as a ritual, as a performance, and as a big show.

• Ahilan Ratnamohan is and Australian of Sri Lankan-Tamil heritage who came to Europe to build a football career. When that did not go well, he decided to use his experiences to make theatre productions. He recently joined ROBIN, the Brussels collective-autonomous association for artistic practices also supports (theatre) makers Thomas Bellinck and Pieter De Buysser. This Kaai season, Ratnamohan will also work with the performers that he met through the Brussels open arts centre Globe Aroma.

 ‘While klapping has a number of outcomes, for me, in essence it's about creating new communities.  It's about re-imagining macho cultures in idiosyncratic ways and trying to find the nuance which so easily gets left behind these days.’  – AHILAN RATNAMOHAN