The Brooklyn dance craze with a serious message

When black teenager Trayvon Martin was shot dead by neighbourhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman in Florida in 2012, there was an outcry in America.

 

 

In East New York, an area of Brooklyn, Reggie Gray and his friends decided to stage a protest. They did so the way they knew best. They danced.

"That was our form of getting stuff off our chests," says Gray.

"OK, we can't talk about it too much. But we can dance really good. So we got into a park and we went for it."

 

They made a video titled Dance For Justice in which around 20 flexible friends showed off their eye-popping, limb-twisting, bone-breaking moves.

They were flexing - a danceform that grew out of the Jamaican reggae dancehall style 13 or 14 years ago. Gray says it has become something of a phenomenon in Brooklyn, and is now spreading around the world.

Gray, nicknamed Regg Roc, has had no formal dance training. "My dance training really just came from the street," he says.

"It was just me, Michael Jackson and a lot of people on the streets, just dancing and doing their thing. I watched them consecutively to understand how to do certain moves."

 

He and his friends went on to devise their own moves, like pauzing - a stuttery action that was invented when Gray liked the way pressing pause on a VCR put figures into a repetitive glitchy loop.

With their sharp angles and mechanical movements, they would practise in schools, streets and train stations. "Anywhere we could," Gray says. "There was no limit to it."

The style took off after Gray and his crew became regulars on public access TV show Flex N Brooklyn, which gave the style its name.

The Trayvon Martin case was followed by further unrest over the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, both black men who died during confrontations with the police. In response, flexing began to morph into a form of storytelling and protest.

A show at New York's Park Avenue Armory earlier this year featured around 20 dancers depicting street life and social injustice.

Inspirational moment

Now, Gray has brought flexing to England for a show at the Manchester International Festival.

He has brought 10 New York dancers with him, and has recruited and trained 10 more from Manchester to perform in FlexN Manchester.

Gray asked each of the dancers to think of a time when their lives changed, and to create a short routine about how it made them feel.

Flexing has also spread to other parts of the globe, reaching as far as Russia and China, Gray says. "It started in Brooklyn, and now it's all over the world."