Ashley Banjo still gets abuse over Diversity’s Black Lives Matter performance

OHMYGOSSIP — Ashley Banjo still gets a “stream” of abuse over Diversity’s ‘Black Lives Matter’-inspired routine.
The troupe performed the dance on ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ over 18 months and the 33-year-old choreographer admitted he is constantly bombarded with hostility over the politically-charged moment.
He told the Daily Mirror newspaper: “It happens all the time.
“I did this slot on ‘GMB’ [last week] to talk about how life-changing it was winning a BAFTA for the routine and I went on Twitter afterwards, and it was just like a stream of comments. The negative ones always cut through.”
But the abuse won’t stop the collective from performing the routine on their current ‘Connected’ tour, though the ‘Dancing On Ice’ judge admitted he always feels nervous about how audiences will react.
He said: “Every night, I go down and take that knee and there’s a little part of me that just kind of goes, ‘I wonder what’s gonna happen’. You just don’t know.
“We never got the opportunity to perform that routine in front of a crowd at the time because of Covid.
“We’ve never felt what it feels like. You can only guess what the audience may react to but you don’t know. To see an audience react to it is a completely different feeling.”
When Diversity performed the routine on ‘BGT’ in September 2020, broadcasting regulator Ofcom received over 31,000 complaints.
But Ofcom later backed Diversity and the message they wanted to send with the performance.
They said: “Diversity’s performance referred to challenging and potentially controversial subjects, and in our view, its central message was a call for social cohesion and unity.
“Any depictions of violence by the performers were highly stylised and symbolic of recent global events, and there was no explicit reference to any particular political organisation – but rather a message that the lives of black people matter.”

Source: VacationHunter.Online

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