Brian Henry is a dancer of biblical proportions. It’s not just that he’s impressively tall and muscular, with a Moses-like beard. His dancing, though rooted in the street style called krump, has an ancient gravity. Standing in profile with his chest bent forward, he could be an Assyrian sculpture. Breathing like a dragon and then opening his eyes, he could be animated clay, the first man.
Or so he appears in “song,” a solo he created in collaboration with choreographer Andrea Miller that he’s performing this week during her dance company’s 15th anniversary season at the Joyce Theater.
For Henry, 34, a self-proclaimed street dancer who has become the face of krump in New York, performing in a concert dance setting is an opportunity to show that krump is “a dance form that needs to be kept on the same level,” he recently said.
But Henry, aka HallowDreamz, doesn’t change the way he dances. “Just because I’m telling a different story doesn’t mean I have to step outside my process,” he said. He’s just used to people perceiving him one way before he dances and another way after.
Henry spoke at Herbert Von King Park in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, not far from where he lives and where he spent most of his childhood. Most but not all. He lived in every borough of New York City. “My mother used drugs and I was born with drugs in my system,” he said. He was placed in a foster home. Later his mother regained custody but lost it again due to her addiction. When he was 9 or 10 he was reunited with her in Bed-Stuy.
In 2004, he discovered krump online. The form had been established in Los Angeles just a few years earlier. It is an improvisational, in-your-face, combat-based style that combines intense pantomime with stomping, chest slapping, and emphatic arm waving.
For Henry, the connection was instant. ‘They were men who looked like me,’ he said, ‘men who were aggressive and masculine and made movements that resembled fighting. Fighting was one of the first things I learned to do, defending myself on the walk to school and on the playground. I felt the fight, the struggle, the pain.”
At the same time, he added, ‘it was a bunch of guys coming together for something positive. It was born out of gang culture, but channeled in a way that was more spiritual, more healing. It just felt like home, but a better version.”
Krump became an obsession, an escape, a discipline. Henry learned from online videos and DVDs and worked as hard as he could to improve. And others started to notice.
“People started looking at me differently,” said Henry. “I was not seen as just a gangster. I was the dancer child. It showed people that I could be disciplined, that I could be good at something.” This was exciting – “doors opened, I was welcomed into spaces I hadn’t been welcomed before” – but also bittersweet. It made him realize how others had seen him before.
Henry found some friends interested in krump, such as Joshua Staton, called Nightmare, who gave him his dance name. (“He’s Nightmare, I might as well be Dreamz.”) Together they started building a krump scene in New York. Some West Coast krump dancers questioned their authenticity and skill. But, said Henry, “hard-working dancers on the East Coast, like myself, have proven that we are better than many of the best in the West.”
“My roots,” he added, “are the same” as the founding fathers of Krump. But he said he appreciated the time when he “didn’t really know what krump was,” the years when he single-handedly copied and invented videos, because that experimentation “made the sauce that makes me different.”
Henry’s biggest validation came during an audition for a Madonna video circa 2015, when he met Jo’Artis Ratti, known as Big Mijo, who was one of those creators – the one whose dancing people used to say Henry looked like Henry. “Mijo was like ‘Bro, I’m following you, I like your work, you’re Little Mijo.'” said Henry.
Whether in Los Angeles or New York, there wasn’t exactly a career path for a krump dancer. Henry had to part the waters for himself. He made a name for himself by participating in dance battles but also as a teacher. “I’ve taught everywhere, even in ballet schools,” he said. (He also worked nights as a security guard and still works as a personal trainer.)
This, he said, is how he became New York’s best-known krump dancer, the go-to guy: “When you see a younger dancer, they took my class or they took from a student of mine.”
As for performing jobs off the battlefield, there were a lot of auditions and a lot of rejections. “I just had to keep going to find where I fit in,” he said. He was hired for “Bitch, I’m Madonna” and other music videos. He gave a TED talk. He created and collaborated on shows for Works & Process at the Guggenheim Museum. He has had cameos in projects at the Park Avenue Armory and the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the choreographer Bill T. Jones, who described him as “one of those unsung treasures, people who should be cynical but aren’t.”
And now comes the collaboration with Miller. When she first met Henry at a benefit performance, she felt like she was “in the presence of light and thunder,” she said during a rehearsal at Juilliard. But she also felt a kinship: “We dance because it’s part of our survival system.” She was eager to work with him, but worried that bringing in a street dancer might seem like a gimmick or exploitation – “creepy, I’ve seen it so many times.”
Henry said he’s had enough of that kind of experience. “They just put me next to someone who was doing pirouettes,” he said. “Or people try to put me in a box. And if they don’t fit me in the box, I can’t dance.” However, his work with Miller was “a true collaboration.”
Miller agreed. “He’s a collaborative partner and his creativity is limitless,” she said. Much of what Miller provided was a concept, an idea about the prehistoric origins of art, a common subject for her. While she doesn’t put Henry in a box, she does frame him with wooden planks – to help viewers see what she calls his “micro-movements” and also as a canvas for the artist Sharone Halevy, who paints on the planks during the film. performance.
But more than framing sets “song” apart from Henry’s earlier token performances. Those, he said, were “all they gave of me.” This one is ‘all mine’.
And who is that? A devoted father of two teenagers. A mentor who “creates a safe space for men to express themselves emotionally” and who helps others learn to “navigate the chaos”. A person who believes his main mission is “to expand what I know in life to lessen the pain and turmoil my people go through” – most important, that is, “besides getting the dance form done damn well.”