Street Dance Generations

Choreographer, dancer, and teacher Yvon « Crazy Smooth » Soglo has been a major figure in the Canadian street dance scene since his start in 1997. A committed leader in his community, he regularly sits on battle juries in North America and Europe. In 2004, Crazy Smooth founded the company Bboyizm, of which he is also artistic director, in order to bring authentic urban dance to the professional stage. Bboyizm has been recognized for its important contributions to the preservation and development of urban dance, and has performed original works including Music Creates Opportunity, IZM and L’évolution du b‑boying across Canada as well as offering cultural mediation and audience development activities.

Crazy Smooth’s latest work, In My Body, has delighted audiences of every generation, and won four Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts Dora Mavor Moore Awards in 2022, for production, choreography, performance and sound composition, as well as the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity’s 2020 Clifford E. Lee Award in Choreography. The piece was supported through a three-year residency at the O Vertigo Creation Centre – OCCC, which also produced the piece.

As an independent choreographer, Spicey presented three works in Quebec from 2008 to 2015, including Retrospek, which received the RIDEAU – Entrées en scène Loto Québec award in 2009. The Bust A Move Festival, which she launched in 2005, became Canada’s biggest street dance competition.

In 2015, Spicey founded the company Ebnflōh and created Complexe R at MAI. The show would later tour to New York and Amsterdam. In 2019, she presented In-Ward, co-produced by the CCOV. It played nine sold-out shows in Montreal. Spicey won the Prix de la Danse de Montréal, in the Discovery category, in 2019, and In-Ward was a finalist for the Grand Prix of the Conseil des arts de Montréal in 2020. Her sixth work, La Probabilité du Néant, was presented at Théâtre Maisonneuve by Danse Danse in the fall of 2021 to full houses.

Spicey has also been a hip-hop dance performer and professor for over two decades. She is regularly invited to teach master classes and serve as a judge for street dance competitions both in Canada and internationally.