JAYPLAY
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The University Daily Kansan > Jayplay > April 27, 2000
Regulars battle on the dance floor at the Granada to be champions of..
Roogie nights
By Sara Shepherd
Strobe lights flash from every direction. Each Kool-Aid-colored cone of light momentarily illuminates curling smoke in the air.
Retro music throbs in sync with the pulsing lights
The pungent odor of synthetic fog, spit beer, cigarette smoke and sweat hangs in the air.
A waitress mills around the crowd, a tray of glowing test-tube shots perched on her hand.
But one group that trickles into the Granada, 1020 Massachusetts St., for the evening bypasses the bar and heads straight for the dance floor. They're not here to drink, and they're not here to flirt — they're just
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For hard-core clubbers like Jun Kirubiayah, Jay Snelson and Doug Hamitton, who hit the dance floor three or even four nights a week, the outing is more than just a party.
The circle of onlookers that begins to form on the dance floor is its own culture, an arena to showcase dancing prowess, a black hole for excess energy, and even a battleground.
By 11:30 in the evening, there's still plenty of breathing room on the dance floor. Snelson, who already has been dancing long enough to work up a sweat, heads outside for some fresh air.
Kuribayashi just arrived. He stands at the outskirts of the crowd, stretching one arm behind his head, then the other. He shakes out his legs and jumps up and down to warm up. Then he squats down, smooths his palms across the concrete floor and nods.
Warming Up
People have formed rough edges of a circle, but it's still one body deep all the way around.
still just one body deep all the way around.
Still outside the circle's circumference,
Kuribayashi starts to bounce to the beat of
the music. Friends check the floor for him
again.
Still dry — free of slippery sweat or split cocktails
Kuribayashi takes a deep breath, puffing his cheeks out as he exhales. The crowd watches him with raised eyebrows. He pauses a moment to mark through a sequence of moves in his head, then he jumps into the center of the ring. After several beats on the ground, he nimbly arches his body into a handstand and spins around, still on his hands. The crowd applauds when he finally urges himself and rejoices them.
But the good music hasn't even started yet. The dancers are only warming up. They'll get serious later.
Later, the circle stretches to form a canvas for their art, the regulars' own personal stage and the reason they come here week after week.
The ring provides the closest thing to a spotlight that anyone — except for the booked performers — ever gets at the Granada.
"I like to impress people, so gettin' in the circle, it's just that much better," Snelson said. "It's about skill and showing off what skill you have."
"I like to entertain people," he said. "It's an adrenaline rush for me."
Kuribayashi admitted to being a ham, too.
Circling Up
Even though not everyone in the group are friends outside the club, they stick together on the dance floor.
we all see each other in the circle. Hamilton said. Hamilton said each dancer showed up for different reasons, but they were all part of the same crowd, the same dance culture.
With about 20 people who know the routine, it isn't hard to get them to circle up.
Hamilton demonstrated several break-dancing moves and explained their purpose. Toprocking is a sort of back and forth crossover step. The movement, almost like an appetizer of dance steps, gives the impression that bigger things are to come.
"That's how you create the crowd," Hamilton said.
"That's how you create the crowd," Hamilton said. Kuribayashi said the Granada crowd tended to drift to where the action was.
"Before you know it, you've just got a ton of people watching you," he said.
The spacious dance floor at the Granada is essential, Hamilton said.
"In order to break dance, you have to have a circle."
he said. "You have to have two covers."
If the circle becomes too tight, someone has to circumnavigate it, resturing for people to scoot back.
"The circle doesn't get bigger unless you make it," said Dean Royal, another regular.
Kuribayashi said he had another method of convincing onlookers to back up — make people realize "dude, he's gonna do something you don't want to get hit by."
By 12:45 a.m., the house lights have dimmed even more, and there are two or three rows of people clustered all the way around the circle. The flashing strobes seem to prod people to the center.
Keith Kennedy, who also frequents the club, struts to the middle and points to himself as if to say "Watch
Club Kid Profiles
Works at Community Mercantile Co-Op and a local pet store
Occupation:
Club Kid Profiles
Jay Snelson Age: 21
Name:
Name:
Doug Hamilton
Age:
24
Occupation:
District Court clerk
Name:
Name:
Jun Kuribayashi
Age:
21
Occupation:
Cook at Set 'Em Up
Jack's restaurant
Name:
Dean Royal
Age:
24
Occupation:
Part-time KU student and assistant manager at Capitol Federal Bank
this" — then starts dancing.
Hamilton promptly jumps in, lies down on the floor in the fetal position and lays his head on his hands.
Hamilton explained the gesture — a joke, in this case — with a laugh.
"He was boring," he said.
One after another, the people with the itchiest dancing feet take turns in the circle's nucleus.
"If you feel the music, then you just go out there on your own," Hamilton said.
Or sometimes, it's whoever's got the glow sticks. Different Dresses.
A pair of glow sticks gets tossed into someone's hands in the crowd. They travel around the circle, and everyone who touches them takes a turn inside.
"Whoever's got the most energy gets the circle," Kuribayashi said.
When it's Kuribayashi's turn, he takes a few moments to lace the glow sticks into his shoes snee-strings. Kennedy skips around the interior of the circle and gestures for everyone to back up. In the circle, more room equals cooler stuff.
The throng of people taps its feet, their eyes darting around the diameter to see who will be the next in the middle. Kuribayashi stands at the edge, legs straight, feet apart. After a single glance over his shoulder, he's sure the coast is clear.
Different Dances
Now it's his turn.
When he hurls his body into the gaping core of the circle, the crowd is not disappointed. From a series of stylized handstands and asymmetrical balances to a layout back flip, his sinewy, acrobatic movements enthrall onlookers. Beads of sweat on his brow glisten with every pulse of the colored strobe lights.
Kuribayashi said his dancing style was his own combination of a Brazilian martial arts form, called Capoeira, and some breakdancing.
"Capoeira, you use a lot of kicks and stuff, but mine — it's more like dancing," he said. "It's kinda my own thing."
Kuribayashi said his dancing was less martial than straight Capeira, but more aerial than dancebaking.
It combines gymnastic-like stunts, martial arts-type kicks and some ground movement, like breakdancing. Intertwining the different elements with dancing looks really neat, he said.
"Everything I do is all one flowing thing. Instead of, like, actually snapping a kick, you just pull it through and make it look graceful," he said.
For the safety of others, he usually holds back on the flying flips while dancing in a club.
"I don't want to worry the bouncers," he said.
But Granada bouncer Jimmy Kellison isn't too worried. He said the clan did a good job of policing themselves.
"The group that they're in kind of keeps everything kosher," he said. "It's not a problem."
said.
Back in the circle, an array of different people make appearances in the center, each one moving in a unique way.
During each dancer's cameo, Hamilton described some of their styles.
Locking, Kennedy's style, consists of pointing all the joints in different directions, he
Popping, another style, is just like it sounds. The dancer moves with short, jerky movements, like little pops.
In his book, Hip Hop America, African-American cultural author Nelson George describes the two styles as "upright dances in which dancers used their arms, legs, and torsos in isolated, semi-robotic moves requiring great body control." Both moves influenced break-dancing.
Hamilton said dancers learned a lot of moves from the classic break-dancing movie, Beat Street, which is sometimes projected on the movie screen inside the Granada.
"Everyone watches that and tries to pick it up," he said.
Hamilton said there weren't many breakers in the area, and good ones were even harder to find.
"They're like Elvis sightings," he said.
Some dancers add a bit of boogie to their movements
"Boogie is the James brown lookin' stuff," Hamilton said. Rave is another dance style that encompasses twisting, flowing movements of both the arms and legs.
Hamilton said what the group did was part of what's called b-boy — a subdivision of the hip-hop culture.
It's an entire sub culture, Hamilton said. It really is.
While not every Granada regular is a b-boy, Hamilton said most were at least familiar with the sub culture's underlying dance floor principles.
In his book, George said the original b-boys, who were mostly African American or Hispanic, were a product of the chaotic world of New York City in the 1970s. The boy genre consisted of the "dancers, graffiti writers, the kids just hangin' out."
The Battle
For most of the dancers, there's a bit of the b-boy culture pushing them into the center of the circle. Hamilton described the driving force as being called out to battle.
See BREAK-DANCING on page 3B