The Red Bulletin May 2020 (UK)

Angyil
Some of Angyil’s moves surprise even her: “I’ve had moments of looking at myself and thinking, ‘That’s not me’”.
styles – Angyil annihilated another dancer in battle with a
dizzying solo to Missy Elliott’s Get Ur Freak On. All her moves
are unplanned, yet she makes them totally seamless, packed
with sparks of energy. (She finished runner-up of the entire
competition.) When the jokey, easy-going Angyil switches into
battle mode, it’s riveting to watch; she becomes laser-focused
on taking her challenger out of the running. “I can relate to and
tap into different characters from movies,” she says. “Maybe
that character can do supernatural things, like climb walls, or
be a little sinister. I also have a side that’s similar to the Joker
– it just depends on the song. I’ve had moments of looking at
myself and thinking, ‘That’s not me.’ It’s a possession. There are
times when things take over and I’m not in control any more.”
But once she leaves a performance, Angyil doesn’t linger in
those moments for long. To her, there are always improvements
and progress to make. In 2018, she got an invitation from World
of Dance with an offer to bypass the auditions and secure a
“Dancing has helped me
work out trauma and work
through a lot of craziness.
And I’m pretty sure it can
do that for others, too”
guaranteed competition place. This was a year after she was
honoured as Freestyler of the Year at the World of Dance Awards.
Although Angyil was eliminated early on in the second season
of the reality show, her audacious style made an impact. For
one of her solos, she smoothly entered the stage in front of
celebrity judges Ne-Yo, Derek Hough and Jennifer Lopez and,
to C2C’s quirky sampled blues track Down the Road, wowed
the crowd with her pulsing pops. And she freestyled the entire
piece. “They’d asked me not to freestyle. I’m like, ‘Oh, absolutely,
I’m not gonna freestyle.’ I wasn’t going to say it, but I was
definitely going to freestyle,” she laughs.
Angyil has learnt that creating choreography is a bigger
gamble than getting out there and feeding off the energy in the
space. For the past seven years, she’s been trying to pass on this
kind of wisdom, teaching classes around the world – something
she didn’t feel sure about at first. “[But] it helped to have people
who taught me,” she says. “It’d be selfish of me to rob people of
that same experience; to deny them just because I felt a certain
way in my own personal life, or felt like I didn’t want to teach.”
This mix of success and dedication to spreading her craft
has already left a lasting impression. In her old neighbourhood,
there’s a mural of Angyil, spray-painted by the Kansas City
artist collective IT-RA. At 31st Street and Troost Avenue,
Angyil is depicted as a black angel, dancing atop a rough
cityscape, her triumphs immortalised. It’s a reminder to the
neighbourhood of what’s possible. “Dancing has helped me
work out trauma and work through a lot of craziness,” she
says. “I’m pretty sure it can do that for many other people, too.
I think the arts, period, can ignite a global change.”
64 THE RED BULLETIN