How Izaak Brandt Brought Breaking to the Serpentine for the First Time

For Izaak Brandt, the body has always been an instrument. As a breakdancer, you learn to fall, get back up and try again. Failure is never the end. But over the past few years, Brandt’s relationship with his own body has changed.

Last year, after three years of worsening symptoms, he was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. His symptoms had become so severe that doctors initially investigated for cancer. “It’s really changed so much in my life,” he says. “In the last two years, I’ve just realised how fragile my physical body is.”

That realisation sits at the heart of “Soft Shell,” his latest and most personal work to date. Unveiled last week at the Serpentine Pavilion in London, “Soft Shell” inaugurated XXIe Siècle, a new global art programme focused on the performing arts, and marked Brandt’s first public presentation of the piece.

The work brings together sculpture with a seven-person choreography centered on breaking, exploring hardness and softness, strength and fragility, and the relationships between young men and their own fractured sense of self. At its core, however, “Soft Shell” is inseparable from what Brandt has lived.

“This work wouldn’t have come into play if I hadn’t found myself fu***d up internally,” he says. The beginnings of the project stretch back around two years, to what Brandt describes as one of the most turbulent periods of his life. His finances, personal life and health were all under pressure, even while, externally, his career appeared to be moving in the opposite direction.

“On the outside, things looked very, very good,” he remembers. “There were lots of amazing opportunities happening and me and my team were really pushing, but I was not well at all.” Searching for a way to protect his internal world, Brandt became fascinated by animals that use their own bodies as defence mechanisms. Pangolins and armadillos, and the way they curl themselves into protective forms when threatened, became early reference points.

“Everything else was so turbulent, it was like the only thing I’ve got is this physical form,” he explained. “I’ve got to figure out how to navigate through the world in this thing.” Those ideas gradually developed into movement, before the movement itself was translated into sculpture. Over a lengthy process, those physical forms became bronzes, while Brandt and his team continued expanding the project into choreography, sound and performance.

His diagnosis only deepened that exploration. Brandt moved out of London, changed his diet and lifestyle, and leaned heavily on the physical and creative practices that offered moments of respite. “Training or being fully immersed in my creative practice is the only thing that alleviates my symptoms for a short period of time,” he said.

The result is a work in which the body simultaneously becomes a storytelling device, defence system and vulnerable object. That relationship was still being refined during the dress rehearsal the evening before the “Soft Shell” unveiling. Against the architecture of the Serpentine Pavilion, Brandt and his team were making final adjustments, learning how the choreography interacted with its outdoor environment and working out how to push its intensity within a space unlike the studios in which it had been developed.

By the following evening, those details had locked into place. With six other dancers alongside him, Brandt leaned into a physicality that never became decorative. Bodies folded, collided, retreated and re-emerged as the seven performers navigated the Pavilion, carrying the themes Brandt had spent two years attempting to understand through movement.

The clothes became another layer of that visual language. Brandt and his dancers performed in Stone Island and Salomon footwear, placing two brands deeply connected to contemporary subculture into dialogue with breaking, sculpture and performance art.

The project arrived with the support of NOAM, which launched XXIe Siècle with “Soft Shell” as its inaugural work. Its backing helped bring Brandt’s deeply personal idea into one of London’s most significant contemporary art settings, while establishing the foundations for a programme that will continue to support performing arts globally.

There was another important dimension to the cast, too. Brandt deliberately brought together an all-male group of performers and collaborators, using the project to create a space in which men could communicate emotions they might otherwise contain.

“It’s an opportunity for these guys to be very expressive,” he said, “to channel lots of the frustration and anger that’s built up in guys a lot of the time, but channel it into something that’s ultimately very positive.”

That release runs throughout “Soft Shell.” So does Brandt’s relationship with failure. Breaking taught him early that falling is unavoidable. You attempt a move and hit the floor. You enter a jam expecting to win and leave in the second round. You bruise yourself, adjust and return. “You’re constantly bombarded with failure,” he says. “It just becomes a part of the process.”

For Brandt, those moments no longer qualify as failures at all. They are simply stages in what he calls “the creative process of moving towards greatness.” After two years of health problems, anxiety, experimentation and constant adjustment, “Soft Shell” finally had its moment at the Serpentine. Yet its most compelling idea had been present from the beginning: strength doesn’t require the absence of vulnerability.

Sometimes, surviving means learning when to protect yourself, when to open yourself back up, and how to keep moving through both.