How do we gather to dance? Circles, lines, and squares, clumps and crowds. The first three often signal what is commonly called “folk” dance. The last two are common when couples step on to the dance floor. Hip hop traditionally combines a circle of participant/observers who step into the center to solo either singly or in clumps. Often lost in the sea of television hip hop performance styles, it is to these origins that Dancing in the Streets turned for its 24th summer event, part of its series Hip Hop Generation Next.
Coffey Park sits in the middle of Red Hook, surrounded by housing projects. Huge old oak trees shade curved walkways, benches and places to play, a surprising green oasis. On an early June afternoon several young women paint a paper mural; a stylized woman with a swirl of black tresses blending into a cowboy. Small white tents dot the lawn — “information,” an AIDS awareness group giving away food and water to anyone who stops and talks, a green room for performers. A raised platform sits quietly in the sun at a walkway crossroad waiting for performances later in the day.
Circles around changing dance solos are found in many cultures including West Africa, the source of much of the black dance tradition in the United States. The earliest forms that became hip hop — uprock in Brooklyn and breakin’ in the Bronx — both took this form. Inside the circle, also known as a cipher, battles occur, non-violent, though sometimes suggestive, dance competitions won through inventiveness, skill, and pure audacity. The Coffey Park cipher is organized by veteran hip-hop dancer Brandon Albright, aka “Peace,” artistic director for Dancing in the Streets Hip Hop Generation Next and assistant director of the Philadelphia dance company Rennie Harris Puremovement. DJ Forest Webb, aka “Getemgump,” of the Akron dance crew Illstyle Rockers, joins him.
The company members of Illstyle/Peace open the cipher showing off while Peace exhorts the crowd to sign up for the contest — the prize, the two best dancers and the two best spokenword artists will perform again later in the day. Freed from the pressures of theatrical performance, the company is having fun, playfully challenging each other, egging each other on.
As the contest begins an older man takes the stage doing a rubber-legged dance, two teen girls drag each other up hips and upper body, contracting and twisting like dancers on MTV. A young man, decked out in black and white with red hat and belt, proves wonderfully adept at locking and popping freezing movement at one point in his body, allowing it to reappear at another, percussive and robotic his legs are “crazy” through transitions. A young woman good-naturedly turns her solo into a duet as a drunken man joins her on stage thrusting his pelvis in stumbling lewdness. A boy spins from back to shoulder and on to his elbows. A smaller boy, one of the few willing to solo, threads handstands and flips through wiggly legs and crossing feet.
The dancing is followed by spoken word. A young woman reads a heartbreakingly beautiful poem about the loss of her mother. Another raps on the spot.
As the cipher comes to a close Peace announces the winners who will perform for the top prize — an internship with Illstyle/Peace. Then he invites all the children who have been milling on the edges, giggling when pushed on stage before rushing off, too shy to go on alone yet desperate to get into the action, up to dance the latest craze, Chicken Soup.
Performances by Ase Dance Theatre Collective and Illstyle & Peace follow. Students from Brooklyn’s Urban Assembly School of Music and Art (UAMA) and Red Hook’s PS 27 join both companies. But Dancing in the Streets executive director Aviva Davidson’s vision of celebrating the roots of hip-hop as it once was, a creative and constructive catalyst for joyous artistic expression honoring the culture, history, and enthusiasm of the youth and elders of this Red Hook community, has already borne fruit, the energy and enthusiasm around the cipher was the best part of the day, dance going back to its source, to the community.
© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2007
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