Interview: 'Flying Bach' Brings Classical Music & Breakdancing Together For A Unique Experience

On how the Flying Steps came together:

Vartan: For me and Benny, it all started with competitions [between] our crews and traveling a lot. It was the end of the 90s, so we stopped battling his crew and after that, we became friends. That's how we came together, but I think it's little bit of a different story between us all.

I think every time we were searching for people, it was not just because they were good dancers, but also what their mentality was and how their personality [matched]. It's really important that you have somebody on your side that has a similar way of thinking since we are together so much. I think it is important that we feel like a family.

In our country, there was no such respect for breakdancers. They have no respect for us, so we have to do something with the different culture. We want them to understand what we are doing.

In b-boying, you start to create your own style, but we can also choreograph something and we can dance to all  kinds of music. Also, breakdancing grew up and it’s a professional thing now. Often people ask me, ‘Vartan, how long will you dance?’ and ‘Why won’t you do a normal job?’. But this is a serious job what we are doing!

We started with passion but now we’ve become professionals. And this is our job, to dance and for people to take it what we’re doing serious.

But we’re also so happy to be here in America. When we first came in touch with breakdancing, it was like all the movies we saw from America like Beat Street, Breakin’ and Wild Style, and all the different crews. We look up to them. They were our role models and we want the same. We're happy that we can bring something back, something to show them what we’re doing with this breakdancing thing.

We started with this project in 2010 in Germany and we never thought that we would make a world tour. It was just for our country and for our city, and now we are touring worldwide with this one project. It’s so crazy and it was in more than 30 countries, and we had more than 400,000 live viewers. We still can’t believe it.

On bringing a female presence to the all male team:

Ana: I’m actually not a B-boy myself, but I’m a contemporary dancer in this project, and I think this is a nice thing to give the project because for me, I’ve always been interested in acrobatic movements since I did gymnastics. I’m starting to learn a bit of it as well.

I grew up with two older brothers, so I’m quite used to these kind of things. But I think it’s both ways around. If I’m getting tired of them, they’re also getting tired of me in the same way [laughs].

On the importance of crossing cultures: Benny: In the beginning when we started, it was to earn respect for this project from high culture, from the older people, to show them how artful breakdancing is. [Crossing] cultures is really important especially the classical culture, so we came up with this idea to also show the young people ‘Hey, classical music can be nice.” I think people will go in and they will see great dancers and they will listen to great music. And this type of crossover makes it so much more interesting, I think. [It] also changes your style, you know, because also for us we think that a real good dancer has to dance to any kind of music. So, it’s always good to be open. In general, Flying Steps, we always think that we are free. Of course we know the rules of hip-hop. We have been in the game for more than 20 years. We already battled at the Rock Steady anniversary in the ‘90s, and everywhere in the world. But it's just to be creative, to bring something new, you know, I will say that the history with Red Bull and what we have is the best, it’s also now 16 years old. All the other people in government in Germany and Berlin were like “Classical and Breakdancing do not fit together,"but Red Bull team was the only ones that believed in us.