BRKFST Dance Company: The “Future of Dance” Arrives

Before Joseph “MN Joe” Tran became a founding member of BRKFST Dance Company, he worked as a choreographer and dancer for the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves’ “First Ave Breakers.” Tran is the recipient of the 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship and as a former member of world-renowned breaking crew “Knuckleheads Cali,” he has earned multiple first place titles across the globe. Lisa 'MonaLisa' Berman, a founder and co-artistic director of BRKFST, is a McKnight Dancer Fellowship recipient and has been a teaching artist for nearly 20 years. She has worked with acclaimed breakers from Canada to the Netherlands and helped countless students learn to break and reach their potential.

Northrop audiences will be caught up in the best kind of fierce energy when BRKFST takes the stage for the world premiere of STORMCLUTTER—a Northrop Centennial Commission co-commissioned by The Cowles Center. With music composed by company co-founder, and UMN alumnus, Renée Copeland, STORMCLUTTER is an exploration of swirling emotional tensions that build inside us. The dancers embody the inner turmoil of maturation, dissociation, isolation, and the will to accept what can’t be changed.

Breaking, or breakdancing, is a dance form invented in the Bronx and popularized by Black and Latino youth. This highly expressive form represents a cornerstone of hip hop and street culture, and has become so appreciated as an athletic art form that it will be represented in the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. Dancers earn respect through battles and bold feats of movement, and keep this respect by passing knowledge down. “BRKFST’s egalitarian and choreographic collaboration is rooted in the hip hop adage, ‘Each One Teach One,’ that regardless of race, gender, class, experience, or age—everyone remains both the teacher and the student,” reads the BRKFST bio at Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University where they were Caroline Hearst Choreographers-in-Residence for the 2023-2024 academic year.

The BRKFST dancers will restage Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR)’s Dancers, Dreams, and Presidents, following the premiere of STORMCLUTTER. A commentary on American lives that are filled with a mix of ambition, passion, blame, justice, hope, love, and dashed dreams, the work makes a powerful statement. The New York Times calls DBR “as omnivorous as a contemporary artist gets” in praise of his skills as a composer, educator, social entrepreneur, and performer. DBR creates art that speaks truth to power. Browse his full catalog of compositions, film scores, books, and more, on his official site.

BRKFST innovates and improvises in ways most would never expect. In 2022 the company joined the University of Minnesota for an experimental workshop for dancers and musicians. The subsequent creation, CYPHER CLASSIC, is a fun synthesis of two art forms putting their heads together. The company performed in the award-winning, DACA-inspired short film Dreamers by director Maria Juranic. MinnPost says, “BRKFST is thrilling to watch, strong and athletic and surprising. The way they fuse breakdancing with contemporary dance makes you see both differently.”