The Democratization of Dance Talent
Talented Dancers Can Be Found Everywhere. Here Are a Few to Keep Your Eye On.
New York and Los Angeles are ground zero for anyone wanting a career in the entertainment industry. It’s where the agents are, where the contracts are negotiated, and it’s often where the work is. This is true for the dance industry, as much as the acting and singing industries. Even when the video or film shoot take place elsewhere, the casting is almost always happening in one of those two entertainment centers.
There is also a second level of elitism having to do with access to a major city. If you happen to live outside of a major metropolitan region, your dream of becoming a professional dancer may be so distant as to seem impossible to achieve. It’s not just that the kind of rigorous training and exposure to different styles may not be available to you outside of big cities. It’s also that casting agents and other representation are so used to prospective talent coming to them, there is little need for agents to go looking anywhere outside of their own offices.
Social media has partially democratized who can get seen now, but the fact remains that if you live and dance in, for example, Lafayette, Louisiana, unless you have the money to move to, and support yourself in, the two key entertainment centers on the American coasts, you probably just aren’t going to be discovered or make the leap to being a professional dancer.
Yet, there is dance excellence all over the country. This is an area where television and new media have had an extraordinary impact. The internet has made it possible to take a “lesson” without being on site at a studio, and because of MTV and other sites such as YouTube, there is a generation of dancers who have been able to learn to dance in their living rooms, regardless of where they grew up. There is dance talent coming from all corners of the country, some of it studio-trained, lots of it self-taught.
Here are a few shining stars not from New York or L.A. who you should keep your eye on.
Latik McNeil
a.k.a. “Illestrate”
Baltimore, MD
A poet, singer, and dancer, triple-threat Illestrate literally worked his way up from the streets of Baltimore.
AGE: 24
STYLE: Hip-Hop
HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN DANCING?
“I’ve been dancing since I was six years old. I started doing Michael Jackson dances and the Harlem Shake and stuff and teaching myself from music videos.”
WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE THING ABOUT DANCE?
“That you can do it every and anywhere. I sing and dance and rap and a bunch of other stuff, but dance is one of the things that’s always been consistent for me to do. I can go to a performance that’s not for me, and if music comes on, I’m now the performer, you know. And that’s really how it’s always been. When I was younger, it was always the family gathering. If people had music on and I started dancing, and it was like, ‘There goes little Latik; he’s over there doing his thing.’ And I took that from my family to school and from school to the community. And took it from the community to, you know, bigger. I went to an art school for singing at Carver Center for Arts, and I learned opera and stuff, but through all of that, I was still doing dance in that school and pursuing hip-hop.”
WERE YOU EVER NERVOUS ABOUT PERFORMING IN PUBLIC?
“I’m still nervous to this day. One of my teachers taught me this awesome thing about being nervous and your performance. You have to be some type of nervous because if you’re not nervous it means you don’t care, and if you don’t care, you’re not trying to perform. So, you know, I always take that nervousness as, well, I care, so I’m gonna make this as far as I can.”
WHAT’S YOUR STORY?
“Once I got out of high school, I was supposed to go to college. I got cold feet and I was going to community college. But also coming out of high school, my parents got a divorce, and the divorce was hard because my mom was like, you know, ‘You’re an adult now. You’ve got to get things yourself.’ I was pretty much on my own and doing a lot of couch hopping. And when couch hopping didn’t come through, I was downtown sleeping on trains. I was out of work for a little bit. Once I finally got a job, I still didn’t really have a place, so I would literally sometimes have to, like, sleep outside of my job. But I was still performing through all of that and not really letting people know.
“And I would literally go to an event at 7, 8 o’clock, be the first person there and perform, because I also do poetry and stuff, and then I would leave, the last person, at like 2:00 o’clock. And usually most of the things are downtown, anyway, so I would just walk right downtown to the harbor and stay out there for a few hours until the trains started running again. I was also street performing at that same time. A lot of the time, I was performing with the drummers downtown, pulling out my music to make, you know, my little $15, $20 and really just keep my cell phone on. I kept my cell phone on, and tried to keep food in my stomach, because my cell phone was the main way I could record myself, be on social media to tell people about myself, and, you know, be able to call people so I could still make career moves and still find a way to get me some way to choreograph stuff and be in somebody’s video or perform.
“I’m in a circuit here in Baltimore called Be Civil Battles. I’m technically the reigning champion, as far as number of victories. It’s really because I’ve been there since the beginning, and I was there every time. They used to do $200 every other week to the winner, and back when I was homeless, I was really hungry for it and, you know, making sure I got that money.”
BALTIMORE
“Baltimore is a really small city. Most of us know each other. It’s big in size, but everybody knows everybody somehow. I met people downtown at the harbor dancing. I met people at Be Civil Battles. Bmore Than Dance does sessions. I met people there. And if you go to one of those things, you get invited to all those things. Bmore Than Dance has outdoors stuff, has indoors stuff. Be Civil Battles, the same thing. So they kind of just cycle through and that’s how everybody gets to know each other.”
CURRENTLY WORKING ON
“I just had a show with RAWArtists at Baltimore Soundstage and have a show coming up in November performing at an Art Showcase hosted by Nova Gray. I’m a dance teacher/mentor with Bmore Than Dance and Aziza Peace, a youth mentorship program through the arts and social awareness. I’m also working on two books of poetry: Lil Book of Illestrations (In Depth Poetry) and Lil Book of Illicit Thoughts (Erotic poetry).”
FIND HIM
Co-hosting the open mic every Tuesday in SW Baltimore along with Nova Gray at a bar called Greg’s Place.
Instagram: @_illestrate
YouTube: Illestrate McNeil
Jared Brennan
a.k.a. “Arsenal”
Levittown, Pennsylvania
AGE: 23
FAVORITE STYLE: Flexn
STARTED DANCING?
“I’ve been dancing about six years, seven years probably, right before I got into high school. I don’t even know what happened, to be honest. I don’t have a crazy story like everyone else has, like an inspiration story. It kind of just stuck with me after I started watching Step Up and stuff like that. I was an athlete before then. I did every sport I could possibly do.”
LEVITTOWN
“There’s not a strong hip-hop dance community in Levittown. There are only a few dancers here, but they’re all doing the stuff I do, the flexn and stuff. They’re not doing hip-hop per se, but close enough. I came from a breaking and popping community, which I did not like at all, and that was in Philadelphia. But that’s what was available to me at the time, to be honest.”
ABOUT BATTLING
“ I gravitated toward battling because the crowd is more hype in a battle than they will be in a performance. When you’re battling, it’s more than just a one-on-one. The crowd has to like what you’re doing. The crowd also has to understand it. If the crowd doesn’t understand, then you’re going to lose them. And if the other person gets them, then he’s just going to take the entire battle. People like seeing other dancers who are confident as long as they can control their confidence.”
HOW MUCH OF DANCING IS PERSONALITY?
“A hundred percent of it, ’cause if you don’t have a personality, you’re just doing moves. If you have a whole lot of technique, but no personality, you can still draw the crowd if you’re really that good, but the crowd wants to be connected to something. So if you have a good personality and you can show it and interact with everybody and get them involved, they’ll react back with you.”
HOW DO YOU INCORPORATE STORY-TELLING INTO YOUR DANCING?
“Flexn is the way that I can actually tell my story. I will try my best to do both at the same time. When I say both at the same time, I mean catch all the beats but dance strictly to the words. I’ll tell the story of the song, so that it’s not just you hearing it, it’s you seeing it, too. If you hear it and you see it, you could feel it. And if you feel it, you’re getting all the senses, and that’s how you draw the crowd.”
WHO ARE YOU WATCHING?
“I’d say E-Solo, Jayy Black, Silencer for litefeet; Havoc, Slicc, and Stepz for flexn; Versastylez, Tight Eyez and Koncrete for Krump. There’s more in each style, honestly, but there’s so many talented and influential dancers in each style. It’s hard to pin point who really inspires me the most.”
WHAT DOES DANCE MEAN TO YOU?
“Dancing was an outlet for me, so I could almost show people how I was feeling without having to tell them. When you’re dancing, literally your brain shuts down. If you feel the music, you’re not thinking, so all of your problems almost go away. You’re not thinking of anything besides the music. You’re just listening, and feeling, and going with whatever you want to do. But you’re not thinking of all your problems when you’re dancing, and if you are, you’re going to channel it into something that’s going to make you feel better once you get it off your chest.”
WHAT ARE YOU UP TO NOW?
“I dance for the Cleveland Cavaliers on the Scream Team. That’ll be my home for awhile, but for the people who are looking, I won’t be hard to find. I’m trying to be more and more active as this year goes on.”
FOLLOW HIM
Instagram: @shogunarsenal
Neilah
a.k.a. “Neverlessdancer”
Boringuen, Puerto Rico
Neilah was named the Queen of All-Styles in her native Puerto Rico. She is also a photographer and a martial arts instructor. She recently danced in the Red Bull Dance Your Style National Finals in Las Vegas representing her dance studio One Take Studio.
BACKGROUND
“I have been dancing since I was five years old. My first love in the Hip-Hop Culture was breaking and popping. I loved the challenges. I tried to dance it watching a few videos for what was MTV Show that put music videos on. I could see a bit of variety on Hip-Hop, like Mr. Wiggles and other dancers who dance in musical videos, and old school videos of my parents who taught me many things about their times. I stopped break dancing because it hurt me a lot because I did not know how to perform the movements correctly. I continued to dance on my own. I had no instructors, much less mentors, to instruct me correctly in the culture.
“From a very early age, I made shows and dance activities for the community and children. I did many dance shows in schools to keep kids focused on something good and healthy. Because I won many competitions for consecutive years and taught dance for more than fifteen years, today I continue to teach in my company with my own dance programs for children, youth, and adults with the honor of providing them with what I did not have when I was a child.”
PUERTO RICO
“In Puerto Rico, the Hip-Hop Culture is strong, in the aspect that they are always doing events for the Culture. When I mention Hip-Hop Culture, it’s because Hip-Hop is a Culture which consists of four elements: DJs, Graffiti, MCs, and Breaking & Popping. These are the main elements that characterize and define the word ‘Hip-Hop,’ and that is why I mention the Hip-Hop Culture a lot since it does not refer so much to dance, but to know its beginnings and its history, which is very important to know in order to carry a good message in it when it comes to expressing oneself in dance. Thanks to all those OGs that started this Culture. Today, many of us have saved ourselves from many things because the Culture helps us to live better. People think that Hip-Hop is a dance style or choreography but it is not like that. That is completely wrong. Choreography has its real name it is Street Jazz.”
WHAT STYLES DO YOU DANCE?
“Caribbean styles such as Salsa, Bachata, Merengue, and Guarjira. Cultural styles such as Afro Dance, Dancehall, Bomba, and urban styles of Hip-Hop such as Popping, House, Toprock, Breaking and more modern styles such as Krump. I have always believed that learning only one thing will not help us at all. In order to improve and achieve great goals, the mind must be very broad and very open to learn as much as possible and be a better person in the future.”
INSPIRATIONS
“Mr. Wiggles and other OG dancers who have maintained the Hip-Hop Culture of the feet.”
IS STORY-TELLING IN DANCE IMPORTANT?
“It really is, because art is a feeling that when we want to express and above all send that message to other people around it, it must be transmitted with feeling and delivery. If not, the message does not arrive. It’s like the story of life: to be arrived at and understandable, it must be transmitted with meaning and purpose. People forget that that dancing is not just about movements, but also about feeling and the history behind each expression.”
FOLLOW HER
Instagram: @neverlessdancer
Youtube channel: NeverlessDancer
Elijah Fulgham
a.k.a. “X-glide”
Dinwiddie, Virginia.
AGE: 19
STYLE: Hip-hop
HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN DANCING?
“I’ve been dancing since I was a little young one, but trying to make it a career, I want to say about four years.”
STUDIO OR SELF-TAUGHT?
“Self-taught. Literally just teaching myself at the house, standing in my room, putting up videos, learning from other people and then taking what I’ve learned and putting it toward my craft, and my skill, and trying to build up from that.”
INFLUENCES
“Michael Jackson, of course. My family, James Brown, Fred Astaire, Don Campbell and Boogaloos Shrimp. My parents were old school, so that’s who I grew up watching. Dancers of today: Marquese Scott, Chris Brown, Usher, Les Twins, Fikshun, my dance squad, Dragon House. Those would be my mains.”
WHAT STYLE WOULD YOU LIKE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT?
“Modern Dance, to be honest with you.”
DINWIDDIE
“Dinwiddie is a small, little town in Virginia. As a community in Essex County, they know who I am and they know that I dance and things like that. I really feel like people are starting to come behind me and support me and I really appreciate that because this is literally what I’ve always wanted. I’ve always wanted to earn the recognition, you know, to try to make a name for myself for a couple of reasons. One is just to say that I did it. You know, to say it was something fun I did. And two, my main thing when it comes to dancing is to inspire people. I always wanted to be that person people can look up to. A lot of people have said to me, ‘Yo, when it comes to your dancing and seeing your work ethic and seeing how serious you take it, it has inspired me.’ If I can inspire people who are not dancers, and inspire people in my county, what if I can do that with the world in general?”
WHAT DOES DANCING MEAN TO YOU?
“As a young kid of 14, I would get in trouble and do crazy things. Not criminal stuff, but the kind of dumb things: not listening, thinking you know everything when you’re just a kid, a middle school kid. But I was also a very troubled kid. I stayed in trouble when it came to school, but I always danced. I didn’t really take it seriously until middle school. I was getting in a lot of trouble, but I finally found an outlet in eighth grade, and it was dancing and that’s when I started taking it seriously. And when I started taking it seriously, that’s when everything, life-wise, started changing. It really gave me something to focus on, something to look forward to when I got out of school. It gave me something as a goal, something that I knew, ok, well, if I mess this up, Mom will take away dance for a little while. And she did. One time, I was supposed to go to a Freestyle Friday in Richmond and I got in trouble and my mom said, you can’t go, and I cried because I wanted to go dance! But it helped me learn that, hey, make smarter choices, because in the real world, if you make a dumb choice, you might not have that second chance. Dance was a lesson and something fun to do.”
WHAT’S THE FUTURE LOOK LIKE?
“There’s a SubjectiveDance 72Smoke event coming up in December and a plethora of events lined up before then, so there’s a lot in store. I’m also training for bigger events like WOD, SYTYCD and keeping active within the battling aspect of dance.”
FIND HIM:
Instagram: @x_glide
Christine Shepard
Gahanna, OH
Growing up in what she calls “a decently small town” in Ohio, Christine was the winner of Galen Hook’s most recent “Freestyle Routlette” event in New York City. She’s made the leap to New York, but she didn’t start there.
AGE: 22
PREFERRED STYLE: Jazz and Contemporary
BACKGROUND
“I was about 7 when I started dancing. My training was pretty relaxed. I took ballet, but it was not a strict classical structure. I also took jazz, tap, hip-hop and lyrical. I was fortunate enough to have parents who liked travel and would take me to different dance conventions and competitions across the East Coast since my studio didn’t branch out much. This allowed me to meet new people and learn new styles, which only fueled my curiosity. When I was 17, I had my first serious injury that prevented me from dancing. Being stripped of it made me realize how much it meant to me. That was a big mental turning point for me to make dance a career instead of just a hobby. After recovering, I began looking into performing arts schools, moved to New York to go to school for dance and the rest is history.”
FAVORITE STYLE?
“As a child, I would have said jazz, no question. I still think jazz is my strongest style, but now, in my twenties, I have come to love and appreciate theater dance of all kinds. Moving to New York also facilitated a love for classic hip-hop, waacking and voguing. Contemporary is constantly going through evolution, but I’d say it’s my go-to style when I improv, so that, too, holds a close place to my heart.”
HOW DID OHIO INFLUENCE YOU?
“Coming from Ohio definitely made me a dreamer.”
INFLUENCES
“I have a long list of influences because I am inspired by a vast collection of different types of artists. For dancers: Cyd Charisse, Josephine Baker, Nicholas Brothers, Paula Kelly, Alyssa Allen, and Princess Lockeroo. For choreographers, it’s Fosse, Paula Abdul, Martha Nichols, Jessica Castro, and Tessandra Chavez. For people who are both dancers and choreographers:
Wade Robson, Debbie Allen, Ebony Williams. For directors: Mandy Moore and Warren Carlyle.”
FAVORITE THING ABOUT DANCING
“Dancers are superhumans. We are masters of the body, and, to me, the most hardworking artists. To be able to make people feel without opening your mouth is so powerful. To express feelings and tell stories using the physical being is such a gift.”
ON WINNING GALEN HOOKS’ “FREESTYLE ROULETTE”
“The Freestyle Roulette was a dream come true. I am naturally competitive, but I don’t battle because I never felt there was a place in that scene for me. Galen’s mission to have dancers tell a story interested me. I signed up more excited to be in a room of dancers like me, free willed movers who don’t think, just dance. The idea of winning never crossed my mind, I was literally just trying to make it on time because I was running from my 3pm show at Mean Girls. I felt honored to take the title and helped validate my dancing and my freestyle. It also reassured me that I am a storyteller, a human first and then a dancer.”
FIND HER
Instagram: @chrisnshep
Roberto Whitaker
a.k.a. “Aero, da Avatar”
Richmond, Virginia
AGE: 25
PREFERRED STYLES: B-Boy and Krump
HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN DANCING?
“I’ve been learning how to dance since I was 9, mainly because I had no rhythm. I had to work my way on up to building that rhythm. Krumping had just come out around the time I was still in elementary school. I was trying to learn the basics of breakdancing and Krump and trying to combine the two together. (Laughing) So then I joined the Hip-Hop dance ministry with St. Paul’s Baptist Church to basically understand what music was and how to, you know, be choreographic with it, how to interpret the music through movement. I started to pick up on different rhythms and different parts of the music, just basically trying to come to an understanding of how I go from basic rhythm to switching into another instrument in the mix and then to go into a vocal and then switch something up throughout the chorus. The more I started learning, the more I started wanting to do. The more I started taking classes and workshops under other Hip-Hop instructors, the more I wanted to instruct and teach myself. By the time I was 15, I started teaching at Virginia Commonwealth University, so I had to pick up and learn pretty quickly not just dance moves and how to do counts and how to explain other rhythms, but also understand the history behind it, who was impactful in the Hip-Hop game, who was a big influence, who was just now coming in to change things around.”
INFLUENCES
“Besides MJ, Prince, and MC Hammer: Crazylegz, Waydi, Turf, iDummy, Ladia Yates, Sadek, Narsi, B-boy Cloud, Skitzo, Tight Eyez, Les Twins, J. Static, and my family.”
WHY DO YOU DANCE?
“Mostly, because I didn’t know how to. I never really have a legitimate reason as to why I dance. I love learning, so it was no different with learning history, you know, learning about my own native ancestry and finding out the whole Puerto Rican identity, finding out who am I really, where I come from, what language my people speak, and things of that nature. I just love to learn. So I just took that same mindset when it came to movement.”
HAS YOUR HERITAGE INFLUENCED YOUR DANCE?
“I’ve really gotten into my native ancestry and where I actually come from, more Taino and Arawakan, as opposed to Puerto Rican or anything Latin-based. Just really taking that initiative and that learning and understanding, and also the culture and dancing and bring it back to what I have here in this day and age. We’ve got a lot of information about Africa or Europe or Asia, but we know so little about our land past the 1600’s when it became, quote, unquote, ‘civilized.’ Staying in route with that as well as keeping the basis of Hip-Hop, putting those two together and seeing where we’ve actually come from, from one plane to the next, and how it all correlates, to make that connection and just be able to put all that into my art form. It doesn’t always have to be straight Hip-Hop dance. That element can still be there with the movements of tradition. And that’s really why all the history comes in handy. Like I know almost exactly what my people were doing during these times. I know the interpretations they have of it now. I know I can put that to, you know, something that a lot of people over here probably won’t understand. If I play a song that carries a sample of a flute pattern played by an Arawakan tribe down in Puerto Rico, they won’t know exactly where that comes from, but the feeling will still be there, like, ‘oh, I see this is a part of my ancestry.’ You’ll be able to tell I come from a tribe somewhere around this region. You still get the message across.”
WHAT ARE YOU DOING NOW?
“Working with both The Latin Ballet of Virginia, and Hiplet Company based in Chicago.”
FIND HIM
Instagram: @aerodaavatar
Facebook: Robert Aero Whitaker
YouTube Channel: Aero, da Avatar
