Known as the “Gentlemen of Hip-Hop,” Fly Dance Company features male dancers mixing it up with bits of athletic movements, vaudeville and even some comedy influenced from the Marx Brothers.

“Fly Dance Company: The Gentlemen of Hip-Hop” will perform at 7pm on Sat, Feb 9 at The Barn in Winthrop, WA.

Casco, the executive director of the company, considers the movements to be universal.

“If you take the music away and put some hip-hop music behind it, it’s more hip-hop than hip-hop itself,” he said. “We try to present our concert in a way that’s acceptable to everybody, from 8 years old to 80.”

The company, with self-taught dancers, considers itself as a contemporary dance company with hip-hop technique. Casco sees formal dance training as limiting.

“With formal ballet, they are very strict on where your positions should be,” he said. “First position, second position. We respect that and it’s a very hard discipline. With hip-hop, it’s the opposite of that. It’s sort of what modern is to ballet. With us, it’s all about the feeling and how the music moves you.”

Like all dancers, performers of Fly Dance use technique and movement vocabulary.

Casco constantly encourages his dancers to find new ways to express themselves.

“If they do a move this week, they don’t want to do the same move next week,” he said. “There’s a foundation that everyone builds off of, but then we want to keep evolving the movement. You want to create your own step. Originality is something that our artists really crave because you don’t want to dance like another guy.”

That leads the dancers to always search for an individual style, including bits of acting, personality and other aspects.

“Come with an open mind,” Casco said. “If you have any stereotypes on what hip hop is, we’re going to shatter all of that. We want to let the audience know that you won’t be offended. You’ll be at the edge of your seat.”