Wave Gang Japan: StoryBoard P - Motion Picture Wave x Cocain Ballet | @EtheRealStory

     Storyboard P, a Brooklyn dancer, comes from the 1300 block of Eastern Parkway, on the border between Crown Heights and Brownsville. When he was five or so, his grandmother tugged him onto the dance floor at a family gathering and, as reggae played, got him moving for the first time. “I hated it,” Storyboard said recently. A shy child, he felt intensely exposed: “When you’re dancing, you’re revealing yourself—all these temptations, vulnerabilities, things you can’t see otherwise.” But he came to find the sensation addicting. Today, at twenty-three, he is a star of flex, a form of street dance characterized by jarring feats of contortion, pantomime, and footwork that simulates levitation. Much in the way that Savion Glover infused tap dancing with visceral aggression, Storyboard has pushed street dancing in a darker, more mature direction. His choreography, most of it improvised, has a wide range of influences: Jerome Robbins, especially his work in “West Side Story”; the Nicholas Brothers, whose acrobatic tap-dancing routines amazed Fred Astaire in the nineteen-forties; and, above all, Michael Jackson, whose otherworldly movements frightened Storyboard when he was little. “I would cry when I saw Michael,” Storyboard said. “His energy would scramble your frequency.” Storyboard has some formal training—when he was about ten, his parents enrolled him in ballet classes at the Harlem School of the Arts—but he says that his technique comes mainly from “motherfuckers I’d see on the block.”
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