ILLUSIONS OF THE BODY captures New York’s street dance cultures with a focus on styles that have contributed to the most cutting-edge breakthroughs in Hip Hop-related vernacular over the past twenty years. This includes Dancehall, Bruk Up, Flexn (who are all connected) and Krump, among other genres.

To illustrate, Bruk Up is the avant-garde offspring of Jamaican Dancehall and New York Popping that emerged out of Brooklyn in the mid 1990s. New York Bruk Up draws on the innovations of Jamaican dancer and contortionist George Adams, aka “Bruk Up” (“broken” in Jamaican patois), who moved to Brooklyn from Kingston in the mid 1990s. As a child, he suffered from osteomyelitis that left him crippled until his teens, contributing to the creation of an extreme, distorted body language that became Bruk Up vocabulary. Bruk Up consists of a basic structure that includes the shoulder pop, framing, pivoting, locking and waving.

Each fundamental acts as a visual representation of the sound. The shoulder pop is the base, the frames accent the beat, and pivoting helps give identity to the body’s flow of motion by having the feet compliment the body pattern. Waving matches the emotion of the song, so flow styles express feeling. Performing these in combination creates visual effects that can be overlaid with character enactment.

Until identity is added – the disembodied smoothness of a ghost or the laziness of a zombie – all Bruk Up performance is considered freeform. As veteran Bruk Up dancer Albert Esquilin, aka “The Ghost,” said: “It is about letting the music possess you and becoming a living, moving story.” A self-referential, fully developed international dance community with roots in the Caribbean and the African continent, there is a dance revolution happening in the streets of New York City that will continue impacting the world in the years to come. Brilliant innovators and elite dancers like Saalim “Storyboard P” Muslim, Tyrell “Rocka” Jamez or Albert “The Ghost” Esquilin and represent the unsung leadership of cutting-edge, contemporary Black culture in the United States. The effort to document and promote street dance speaks to an absent formal infrastructure that might otherwise maintain and advance the art form.

For more information, see:
Black Dance Matters by Petra Richterová