The Brooklyn dance company Gallim is celebrating its 15th anniversary season at the Joyce Theater this weekend, with performances running through Sunday. Befitting a milestone celebration, the program incorporates some favorite past dances, including "FROM" and "No Ordinary Love."
But the program also includes a new work, "song," which incorporates an unexpected style: krumping, an aggressive, high-energy street-dance born in Los Angeles during the early 2000s. Andrea Miller, Gallim's founder and artistic director, developed the piece in collaboration with Brooklyn dancer Brian "HallowDreamz" Henry.
Miller, who formed Gallim with the express intent of fostering a more diverse, inclusive and accessible dance community, first met Henry at a cancer benefit show, she says, and immediately felt connected to the way he danced. Krumping involves highly energetic and dramatic movements that are often intense, with dancers sometimes invading one another's personal space to execute moves like stomping and chest-popping.
Miller invited Henry to teach in Gallim’s community dance classes. When the time felt right, she presented the idea of working together formally.
“I feel what we share is this thing where human expression, especially art making, is an instinct of survival,” Miller said. “That's what I see when I see his work. And that's what I feel about why I make work.”
Brian "HallowDreamz" Henry
Henry, now 34, was born and raised in Bed-Stuy. He says discovering a video of krumping creators Ceasare “Tight Eyez” Willis and Jo’Artis “Big Mijo” Ratti in 2004 saved him from possibly living a life filled with gang violence.
“Immediately, I was just like that little kid at home in his socks on the rug doing the moonwalk,” Henry said. “I was trying to figure out every move. I was trying to figure out how to do it. I was figuring out why it's being done. I had an obsession from that moment.”
From childhood, Henry had seen his two older brothers go in and out of jail regularly. His mother was addicted to drugs, and eventually he was put into foster care. He says never consciously decided to get further into dance and pull away from street life — it just sort of happened.
“No different than a child playing a video game all night and they forget what time it was, I've just been dancing for so long it wasn't all night, it was all year," Henry said. "Then it's two years, three years, four years. It was kind of easy, because it was better than everything else that I felt like my community, my family, everything around me had to offer me.”
Henry describes the “dynamic, explosive and passionate” movement involved in krumping as “the rugged man's dance.” He believes the style should get the same respect as other modern and contemporary dance forms, for the way each movement comes together to tell a story.
“These stomps, chest pops, arm swings, focus points and head movements — with all these tools that we're using, how can we tell the story?” Henry said. “Every movement has an intention, there’s a purpose for every movement, and it's tied to the story.”
Henry says collaborating with Miller to create ”song” felt natural because of her commitment to creating non-traditional modern dance works and her openness to embracing krumping on its own terms. Usually when he’s been asked to bring krumping into someone else's performance, his work has been reduced to only a few seconds within longer productions.
With “song,” Henry says, he got to be more involved: Miller provided a concept, but both dancers brought ideas about execution to the table.
“This is an actual collaboration of the minds,” he said. “I'm being presented the opportunity to present myself and my craft in what I feel is its fullness, which I don't often feel I get the opportunity to do.”
Miller finds a feeling of freedom in this kind of collaborative work, "where you both have so much to give, but in really different ways,” she said. “I think we both really felt like we could be ourselves, and that we could bring to the table the things that we love about dance, and what we love about art making.”
She says she doesn’t have any expectations for how people will feel after witnessing “song,” which also involves original music by Rivka and art made onstage by painter Sharone Halevy. But Miller hopes people will see how organically krumping and modern dance come together.
“Sometimes these collaborations are cringeworthy, where it's like 'ballet dancer meets pop,''' she said. “I really don't want people to miss the reason why Brian and I both felt like we really wanted to work together. We really believe we have something we share about why we dance, so I hope that we can get close to that connection that we've made, onstage.”
