We moved from the suburbs to L.A. and I picked up break dancing when I was 10. I joined a dance crew in high school and I was battling. I also took ballet most of my life until high school.
A lot of times, when people say hip-hop, they don't know what they're talking about. They just think of the rappers. When you talk about hip-hop, you're talking about the whole culture and movement. You have to take the whole culture for what it is.
Oh, hip hop is always changing.
I'm an excellent dancer. I keep up with whatever's hot. I've been break-dancing and pop-locking since back in the day.
I'm an urban act.
I was not an athlete, but I was a break-dancer. I was a beatboxer, an entertainer.
Hip hop is the new rock n' roll, you know what I mean? And anybody who doesn't think that is just sort of living in the past. It's all just American music, really, when you get right down to it.
West Side Story was terribly important because of the style of the dancing and the gangs of New York.
When I first moved to New York, I wanted to be a dancer. I danced professionally for years, living a hand-to-mouth existence. I never tapped into nightlife; all I knew was dancers. We went to bed early and got up early and went to free concerts at the Lincoln Center and Shakespeare in the Park.
I'm a b-boy for life. I'm a dancer, I started with free style dancing and b-boying during the '80s and I always said to myself that when I get the chance to do my own thing, I will always have the b-boy element and the dance element because that's where I come from.
When I was younger, I was one of the few girls in the neighborhood who could break dance. That's kind of my local, ghetto-celebrity claim to fame.
When I was a kid, we got in a cipher and battled each other lyrically. We told jokes and made the hottest dance moves.
I do ballet and pointe work. I also do tap, commercial jazz and technical jazz, freestyle street dancing.
I didn't grow up on dance class. I was always natural. I've been in the industry since I was eight and I've always had a choreographer since then. But I never really took ballet or anything like that.
I think hip hop is a dance music that's rebellious by nature.
I Bust-A-Move! Old-school style too: like, I'll bust a Robot out in a second.
If I played a tough kid on the street I couldn't go out there and get into fifth position. I had to dance like a tough kid on the street.
First of all, break-dancing has been done for years, though not all of it put together the way it is now. But, actually, the distinctions have been blurring since the 1950s.
I'm from Chicago, so you know we come from juking and footwork.
Everyone is unique to the way that they dance in New Orleans.
I'd been collecting eccentric moves since I was a kid and didn't even know that the dance step I improvised in 'Be Back Soon' was called a 'pas de basque.'
You street-dance in a club, you're performing. Whether anybody sees me is a whole other thing. But it doesn't matter, because it fills my void.
I'm a B-boy at heart. I still like rhyming. It's just the radio game is like Chinese arithmetic. It's hard to know what nuts to crack. But I still love music, been dropping music. Never stopped, really.
I remember going for the first time to a place called The Roxy in New York because you can see people breakdancing there. That's the only reason I went! It's amazing, kids are still doing that.
Before I got into stand-up, I used to be a hip-hop dancer in a crew, and my name was J. Smoove, and my partner was J. Groove.
