San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Dance groups find new purpose amid COVID.
Virtual rehearsals offer a stage for new moves and reflection on social justice
As dusk fell on a chilly evening last October, a group of about 15 people converged in the parking lot of Oakland’s Flax Art Supply. Spaced 6 feet apart, silhouetted by portable floodlights with rapper Yxng Bane blasting from Bluetooth speakers, they began to dance, moving with a fluid swagger that could make an audience forget they were wearing masks.
Normally, hiphop dance company Groove Against the Machine would have been working together in a downtown Oakland dance studio. Normally, they would have enormous mirrors to help them master choreography and a surround sound system keeping them on the beat. But, like just about everything else, the coronavirus pandemic had disrupted the group’s routine. Their twiceweekly rehearsals had moved outside into the cold.
“We all have a constant desire to keep dancing,” says Groove codirector Daniel Kang. “So we’re adapting to what’s happening and not giving up.”
Groove is one of many modern hiphop dance companies in the Bay Area. Ranging from crews of five to battalions of 50, dance team members work day jobs as doctors, developers, waiters or students, and live a second life as dancers, rehearsing for hours each week in tightknit groups that become like family. They perform and compete across the country or internationally, each group evolving its own specific style melding genres from popping and locking to contemporary and ballet into a dance DNA as unique as a fingerprint.
When the first COVID19 lockdown rippled across the Bay Area last March, the dance community reeled. Countless hours spent mastering choreography for dance competitions or performances were suddenly down the drain. But as the pandemic unfolded, the crews adapted: leveraging technology to rehearse remotely, dancing outdoors and performing via YouTube or Instagram as live events disappeared. Over the last year, they’ve found ways to keep dancing together, strengthening their community and confronting social justice issues in the process.
Hip-hop’s family tree
Watch a few videos of hiphop dance groups, and eventually you’ll focus on the feet. Dozens of them, moving together with almost military precision. The choreography built onto that footwork — the aggressively graceful movements, the swagger, the sassy, sometimes sexy attitude — is what makes this type of dance so popular today. But the history of hiphop dance (and the numerous styles often grouped under the umbrella term “modern hiphop”) goes back decades.
The Bay Area’s modern hiphop dance culture traces its lineage back to both the Bronx in New York, where the style was born in the 1970s, and to Oakland’s Boogaloo street dance movement of the 1960s. Many of the techniques and movements that are part of current hiphop dance vocabulary can be mapped back even further, to dances of the
African diaspora.
“It’s almost like a secret society that is a part of ancient African rituals when you dance,” says Traci Bartlow, a Bay Area dancer, activist, educator and entrepreneur. “It’s part of this authentic style that has morphed into so many other forms of hiphop dance.”
Hiphop styles first made their way into Northern California dance studios in the 1980s. From the loosely organized crews that danced together at cyphers (freestyle dance circles) or participated in battles, teams and companies began to form, often based out of studios. A parallel movement was growing simultaneously in Southern California, and car show organizers hosted the first few dance group showcases in the 1990s to draw crowds to their events. Members of the dance community soon began producing their own shows and competitions focused on hiphop styles, including events like Vibe, Prelude, Body Rock and Fusion. They drew dancers and teams from across the country and, eventually, from around the world.
Micaya (who goes by a single name) is one of the Bay Area’s best known “dance mammas,” and founded San Francisco’s International Hip Hop DanceFest in 1999. “I realized that there was this huge talent pool that a lot of people didn’t know about,” she says. “I wanted to bring a higher respect to these dance forms, and see if people will come sit down in a theater to watch this type of dance like they would watch the ballet or a play.”
Her event began in San Francisco’s Theater Artaud, a space with capacity for 350. Before the pandemic, it had grown into a highenergy, multiday showcase that attracted dancers and groups from around the world and boasted more than 3,000 spectators annually. “I call these dance groups companies because it’s an art form,” Micaya says. “You would never say ‘ballet team.’ ”
For many local dancers, joining a dance company felt like coming home. Rocko Luciano, codirector of INQ dance company, had that experience with Funkanometry SF, a local group that has since disbanded. “I’m a queer person of color with all these weird ideas, and I always felt kind of on the outside. Finding Funkanometry SF, seeing queer people dancing alongside masculine
Bboys, learning from each other and encouraging each other, was such a formative experience for me.”
Many of the leaders in today’s hiphop dance scene can trace their family tree back to one of three groups formed in the late 1990s and early 2000s: Gen 2.0, Mind Over Matter and Culture Shock. In the early days, dancers floated among groups, often performing and competing with more than one. Tarik Rollerson, the founder and director of Oakland’s 1Up Crew, says, “When I was dancing back in the mid to late 2000s, everyone danced together on multiple teams. Now it’s different, more professionalized, and most groups ask their members to sign a contract to dance only with them.”
Those contracts, offered after a dancer has auditioned and been accepted into the group, demonstrate the hard work and dedication expected. Agreements often require members to pay for dues (sometimes as much as $200 a month), performance costumes and competition registration fees, and to pay a penalty if they show up late. The time commitment is intense, too: Some crews work together for 10 hours or more per week. If dancers don’t meet their obligations, they can’t compete or perform.
But the time spent moving and sweating together creates the glue that binds these groups. “On Groove, we rehearse together until the wee hours of the morning and travel to do shows and competitions together. When you get a group that has a common bond like that, you become almost like family,” says Leslie Panitchpakdi, codirector of Groove Against the Machine. “When people audition, it’s not just about if they fit in dancewise, it’s about if they fit in energyand personalitywise.”
Finding a COVID rhythm
When the pandemic halted Groove’s twiceweekly rehearsals last March, the 25member team tried to continue rehearsing over Zoom. But for dancers used to learning choreography live with the visual cues of a studio mirror and the people around them, working virtually is tough.
“A lot of what we do as dancers is based on each other’s energy,” Panitchpakdi says, “whether or not we knew that when COVID hit, we know that now.”
After a few attempts at teaching routines online, the group put things on hold until September, when they were able to hold masked rehearsals outdoors, a muchneeded outlet. “Being on Groove during COVID has been a lifesaving thing,” says artistic director James Wilkes. “Everything was taken away from us, so when we started dancing together again, it was such a sigh of relief.”
Other Bay Area companies have leveraged technology to continue working together. INQ codirectors Luciano and Alli Fritz have started using PowerPoint and PDFs to help their 20member dance company learn new choreography and formations. They still host virtual rehearsals, but INQ has shifted from mandatory attendance to using it as an opportunity to check in on dancers.
Since competitions and performances are on hold indefinitely, INQ has started creating choreography for video projects — rehearsing the formations and perfecting the moves remotely, then filming with masks on. Their most recent film, “Lost Time,” was released in October. Its plot featured a governmentdirected drone stalking dancers across the Bay Area.
“INQ has been a big provider of comfort for all of us,” says Fritz. “If you asked me a year ago if I would be excited about dancing outside in the cold in a ducttaped square, I would have said heck no. But dance is truly one of the most important things to me. It’s my therapy, but I’ve never had to use it like I have during COVID.”
Tarik Rollerson’s 1Up Crew followed a similar trajectory. Right before COVID they threw Double or Nothing, a fiveonfive crew battle. “We had over 300 people there; some came from L.A. or Vegas. And then we went from that high to doing nothing overnight,” Rollerson says. “So we started doing checkins about mental health to see how everyone was dealing with things.”
They also shifted to teaching choreography over Zoom with occasional outdoor masked rehearsals and launched a film project called “Unfollowed,” a dancebased horror series. In the weeks approaching Halloween, they released a full episode each
Friday on social media.
Movement for social justice
On a warm Monday afternoon in June, less than two weeks after George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, roughly 80 masked dancers converged flashmob style on Frank Ogawa Plaza in Oakland. As rapper Lil’ Mo’s hiphop anthem “4Ever” blasted from portable speakers and onlookers cheered, dancers from the Groove community executed a crisp hiphop routine as a peaceful protest in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. The event, organized by Groove codirector Kang, raised $800 to support local Blackowned businesses. Another dance protest and rally from 1Up Crew raised $1,500 for the Black Lives Matter organization.
Over the summer, Groove also hosted several Zoom roundtables to give dancers from different teams a chance to talk about their experiences and work through trauma. “We opened up this conversation so our team members could talk about things that were impacting them, like sexual harassment or Black Lives Matter or safety, and a lot of people shared their stories,” says Groove artistic director Wilkes. “Life is a different experience when you’re afraid to walk home with a hood on your head if you’re brown or Black.”
Event organizers are also engaged in the conversation. Mi Le is a dancer with the Main Stacks dance team and executive producer of Prelude, a major national dance competition held in Northern California. “This past year, with all the social justice issues coming up, Prelude took a step back to analyze our mission and our core values,” she says. “And the organizers of major dance events, like Body Rock and Vibe, have all been talking about what our next steps are and how to help the dance community move forward.”
In November, Main Stacks and Prelude NorCal hosted a multiday virtual event titled “Can the Front Half Sit Down,” focused on the appropriation of hiphop dance styles. The sessions covered everything from the evolution of hiphop dance and how to honor dance culture, to antiracism strategies and inclusive dance communities. Dancer and activist Traci Bartlow was one of the featured speakers. “Knowing that these dance styles are something that came out of the Black experience and that the nonBlack dancers that just live for dance are committed to doing antiracist work is so important,” she says.
The forced pause of COVID and the Black Lives Matter movement has also triggered internal reflection around terminology. “Urban dance,” once used as a catchall term for many different dance styles, is being eliminated because of its negative connotations. The community is still searching for the right words to replace it.
“Over the past 10 years, as these dance forms became popularized, no one was thinking about where these labels came from,” says Bay Area dancer and event producer Bibi Khalili. “Urban dance was used as a loose description, but to be candid, it was how other cultures appropriated these dance styles more than anything else. It’s been a crucial conversation.”
And that conversation is ongoing. As pandemic whiplash continues, vaccine distribution widens and dancers look forward to getting back into the studio, how the dance community will move forward is still hazy.
“The Bay Area dance team community is relatively new, and I think everyone is taking this time to think about what our purpose is,” says INQ’s Luciano. “This is a huge moment to reconsider our practices around how we interact with these dance forms, how we support the communities they come from and engage in social justice. That’s going to encourage a reframing of what we do. Why is there a dance showcase? Why is there a competition? Clear purpose will become an expectation.”
One thing is already clear: The families formed over years of rehearsals and showtime jitters will persist, and the joy of dancing together as a cohesive group, hitting the beat as one, is more vital than ever. “I’m so thankful that I have this builtin community that’s in the same mindset that I’m in,” says Panitchpakdi. “There’s so much looming right now that it’s nice to tune it all out and dance with people that love you.”