Plus One
Popping fresh

By Vivian Host

I SPENT LAST week doing skittles, sackies, slides, and CC rocks. Not new drugs (although I'd trade my TV for some new drugs) – but dance moves. On a Tuesday night, I found myself in a dance studio on Divisadero Street following the moves of a kinetic five-foot-six-inch man named Zulu Gremlin in an attempt to contort my stiff, computer addict's body into untoward shapes. I came close to mastering puppet hands but was humbled when a man in front of me, at least twice my age and in cargo pants, mastered the baby freeze – a move involving propping your stomach up on your elbow, kicking your legs in the air, and holding them there in a twist.

I know that at this point you are expecting this story to be like one of those Disney movies where a hapless, uncoordinated boob overcomes clumsiness to become a hip-hop dance superstar, but it's not. I actually possess rhythm, not to mention a fierce running man. However, the height of my dance game came and went six years ago, when I was like the Marcel Marceau of rave dance circles. These days I'm not so oriented toward "moves" – I can more often be found doing a drunken (if on-beat) shuffle at a bar near you. Still, for someone at the ripe age of 25, I manage pop-locking's most mainstream tricks – the moonwalk and the robot – quite well. Such things are great for freaking out people in line for the ATM and wowing the boss at corporate Christmas parties.

My dance with Gremlin was part of a series of a master classes put on during Urban Momentum Dance Week, an event curated by Prem Kumta, best known as the promoter of the Flavor events. Urban Momentum culminated last weekend in two huge all-ages dance battles at SomArts Cultural Center, where teams in all different styles of dance competed for cushy $1,000 and $2,000 cash prizes.

"I stole the idea of the dance week from capoeira," says 27-year-old Kumta, who trains in the Brazilian martial art, which is reaching fever-pitch popularity in the Bay Area. "They have an event called the batizado – it means baptism – and it's where, if you just started training, you'll get your first belt. The mestre will bring these different teachers together from all over the world, and you'll learn skills from them. Some of them are really good at music, for instance, or flips. You're learning from these different people, and it builds this intensity and this energy. I thought a similar kind of event would be great for urban dance."

Kumta readily admits that, at least this year, most of the hardcore dancers were off training on their own or taking advanced classes, leaving the beginners and the curious to learn from masters like Gremlin, female breaker Asia One, and locking legend Don "Campbellock" Campbell. The class I took was a perfect cross section of the people who are interested in urban dance in the Bay Area. There were petite 17-year-old Asian girls in Adidas pants, hip-hop hippies in tie-dyed tank tops, ex-ravers in baggies looking to re-create their experience of the dance circles at Home Base, and the average guy who had the Alfonso Ribeiro break-dance mat and watched Beat Street over and over when he was nine years old.

Although the casual weekend warrior probably doesn't stand a chance of winning one of Kumta's competitions, he doesn't think dancers should be intimidated by lack of training or stylistic limitations. "The people that win our contests don't necessarily have the best tricks, but they're the best dancers. They understand who they are as dancers and combine their moves with being on beat. I just like to listen to different kinds of music and not worry about what I have to do to it. I mean, what is dance? You can codify as much as you want, but someone either likes how you look when you're doing it and how you're evoking the music, or they don't."

Flavor's next dance competition is Oct. 25, DNA Lounge, 345 11th St., S.F. Go to www.flavorgroup.com for more information.

E-mail Vivian Host at plusone@sfbg.com.