Change the Game Project hits the streets
Dance stars Change the Game in Calgary, Stephen Hunt writes.
Don’t think of a street dance battle as a fight.
Think of it as a poetry slam for your feet.
That’s the message street dancer extraordinaire Cebo wants to deliver to Calgarians unfamiliar with the art form.
Saturday, at MacEwan Hall, Cebo will compete against a number of other dancers, in a variety of genres, for four $ 12,000 first place prizes, in addition to a sponsorship deal.
Cebo is in town along with a number of other street dance stars such as JRock — in addition to all- star deejays like Oveous — all of them working with Bobby Mileage, who has teamed up with Calgary’s Pulse Studios to help bring Mileage’s Change the Game Project to town this week.
Before they close Change the Game with a dance battle, the crew is teaching a group of Calgary dancers a variety of steps centred on the four genres featured in Saturday’s dance battle: hip hop, b- boy, house and popping and locking.
For DJ Oveous, Change the Game presents an opportunity for Calgary dancers his generation of street dancers never had.
“The club was our classroom,” Oveous says. “These guys are so lucky to have this ( opportunity).”
And if the idea of Calgary dancers popping and locking sounds unlikely, don’t worry: it did to Mileage too, two decades ago, when he set out on a journey that took him to Japan, China, Korea — and just about every other country you can imagine — as the demand for street dance exploded globally alongside the growth of hip- hop culture.
“That’s one of the real things I want to get across to people,” Mileage says, “because sometimes, people hear hip hop or street dance and think it’s just strictly for the street kids or the kids in the ghetto — and I can’t express enough how diverse — how global and international — this ( form of ) dance is.
“Really, if you go to any dance studio today,” he says, “whether it’s in the suburbs or in the city, it’s a very diverse group in there — not just black or Latino kids.
“It’s very diverse — ( including lots of ) white kids, ( and) Asian kids. ( It’s) a big mixture of people together that proves that this street dance culture is giving kids the opportunity to express themselves.
“Now that’s not just in the Americas ( either),” he adds, “that’s in Asia, that’s in Russia — I’ve been to Uzbekistan, one of the smallest little countries ( in the world), because they wanted to learn street dance.”
Cebo started out street dancing in various New York clubs. He ended up moving with his family to Japan, where he spent 11 years running a dance studio near Osaka ( which now has more than 1,000 students). Cebo, who has won a variety of the top street dance battles and choreographs for other artists, runs Gen X the Dance Company based in Okayama.
It turns out that in the mid1990s, before street dance got any respect outside of the clubs of New York, it was the Japanese who embraced it as an art form, turning street dancers like Mileage and Cebo into Japanese celebrities.
“The end for everybody ( in the late ’ 80s and early 1990s) was to get sent to Japan,” Cebo says. “It wasn’t even like, I want to be famous or I wanna be big — it was like, I want to go to Japan.”
Watching Cebo, who was born in Antigua, grew up in New York and now lives with his wife and four daughters in New Jersey, dance battle on YouTube, you see a unique style that blends street moves with something else that evokes the great dancers from the 1940s, people like Astaire and Gene Kelly.
And he wants to emphasize that even though it’s called a dance battle, it’s a little more complex than mano- a- mano MMA stuff.
“If it’s done right,” he says, “it’s more of a conversation than a competition.”
It also started as a kind of street diplomacy, where young people could claim their individuality through their feet, he says.
“You first have to understand what it is,” Cebo says.
“For us, in the street,” he says, “if you were ( challenged to be dance) battled, it was for a reason: you shared a name. you shared a girl. You shared a ( city) block — something that there was a differentiality that needs to be made — and nine times out of 10, you became best friends with that person and caused each other to grow ( as dancers)."
There’s also, he says, an important difference between being street and being hood.
“People who are on the street are hard working,” he says. "That’s why it’s called street! Because they walk the street, day in and day out trying to find work to get themselves off the street.
“People who are in the hood don’t wanna get out the hood,” he says. “They just wanna be in the hood — as long as they are hood famous, they will do whatever they need to do.”
Now, thanks to street dance, the Change the Game Project features a crew of cultural diplomats unlike any other.
Mileage grew up homeless, with no parents in Boston. He won a football scholarship to the University of Delaware — his dream was to become a pro football player for the Dallas Cowboys — and obtained a degree in marketing, which he was working in until his dancing talents beckoned. ( He ended up being cast in the first Men in Black video, then joining, along with his dance crew, a Mariah Carey concert tour, which forced him to quit the day job).
Recently, he was in Calgary to perform in a completely different arena: at the Jack Singer Hall, where he delivered a Ted Talk about his extraordinary personal journey.
“To be honest, I didn’t even know what a Ted Talk was at first,” he says, “but once I saw what it was and had the opportunity to use the platform to reach kids like me, and also just people in general about my message and what I feel it to be, I can’t tell you how happy I was to do something like this.
“That Ted Talk,” he says, “was one of the biggest moments of my life.”