A Walk in Their Heels: Meet the Hustle Evangelist

On a humid weekday evening last month, when the shade began to tilt across Central Park, a small crowd created a dance floor from the brick terrace of the Bethesda Fountain. From the DJ booth on one side of the plaza, the rhythm of the disco adorned with pinkish mirror balls pulsates. There were moments of vogue and house dancing, and a few kids were happy to wiggle. However, most of the groups were paired to quarrel with all combinations of gender.

At the heart of the action was Abdiel Jacobsen, known professionally as Abdiel, who celebrated with gold heels and rhinestone-studded shorts. Party Organizer — Part of a series known as Dance Is Life — Abdiel quarreled with everyone, including the stylish character of a straw fedora, an older dancer in a bright red polo, and a little kid in Pigtail. .. Passersby sat on the lips of the fountain and began to look.

“How happy is this?” Said the onlookers.

If you know the hustle only by “Saturday Night Fever”, you don’t know the hustle. The pointing line dance that became famous in the movie has little to do with the partner style that first appeared on New York City streets and underground clubs in the early 1970s. Hustle is fluid, fleet, funky and elegant at the same time. A 3/4 hour dance moves the disco’s 4/4 beats into an oval.

Created by colored youth with many queer innovators, Hustle offers a progressive vision of ballroom dancing, especially in its approach to gender-neutral partners. In the hustle and bustle, everyone can dance with anyone, and everyone can lead and follow.

Hustle has become less popular with discos, but a small group of believers have kept it alive. To the 32-year-old Abdiel, their company feels like a home. Abdiel, a former principal dancer of the Martha Graham Dance Company with competitive ballroom dance experience, has found another type of freedom in hustle culture.

For Abdiel, who is genderfluid and uses their / their pronoun, “hustle has always been about unity,” they said. “It means that under the preaching of music, everyone gets together, as they do.”

In the last few years, Abdiel has become both a Hustle Preservationist and a Hustle Evangelist. Through the DanceIsLife series and his ongoing research and performance project, DoTheHustle, he documents the history of forms and explores their future creative potential.

In the long tradition of gender-neutral partnerships, hustle is outlier. But other corners of the modern ballroom dance world also take a genderless approach to lead and follow, reflecting how the world has changed and who dancers are off the floor. I am.

Abdiel became friends with dancer and choreographer Caleb Teicher. Caleb Teicher’s show “Sw! Ng Out” features a gender-neutral Lindy Hop. At the Fire Island Dance Festival this year (July 15-17), Abdiel and Teicher will premiere a non-binary duet that includes both hustle and lindy hop elements. Prince’s “Soft and Wet”.

“This work is really a means of conversation,” Teicher said. “We will discuss partner dance, ballroom and performative partner dance, and gender.”

Teicher is non-binary and, like Abdiel, has begun to use them / their pronouns relatively recently. Both said they found it easier to express a layered and complex gender experience in dance than in words.

“It’s like we’re personally finding new truths in ourselves and figuring out how to tell others about their realization,” Abdiel said. “Dance helps us navigate it.”

Abdiel grew up in Florida and Maryland and danced West African dance in the living room with her mother from Côte d’Ivoire. “There was always music playing and I had my coffee table aside. That was the dance bug that infected me. That’s a joy,” Abdiel said.

As a teenager, they started training and teaching in the ballroom. At the university, at the University of Arts in Philadelphia, Abdiel discovered the Graham technique, which was talking to the still unexplored part of their existence.

“For religious reasons, I’ve been suppressing sexual and gender identities since I was a kid,” Abdiel said. “The ballroom was also very binary. And I learned about Martha Graham. In her philosophy, you are your only being and therefore you have a responsibility to share yourself with the world as a whole. What a hell! “

Abdiel joined Graham’s company in 2011, but began to find Graham’s repertoire with limited roles for male dancers. While dancing with the company, they began to heel the social class they were teaching by their side. It was partly an experiment of empathy: could they show women how to dance on the heels without knowing how it feels? But it also fueled the desire to seek a more gender-neutral dance environment. They started blogging.Walk in my heelsTeach with the heel and record their experience of dancing.

With the encouragement of friends in the dance world, Abdiel began his quest for a variety of club dances, including house, vogue and waacking. But they had the first dance moment with the hustle and bustle. Among the diverse crowds at their first hustle party, Abdiel saw “a visual representation of my fulfillment,” they said. In stark contrast to the world of ballrooms, here no one can blink, put on the heels, lead as well as follow.

Abdiel became absorbed in hustle culture. They also began to discuss its history with the older veterans of Form. Some of them still came out to dance regularly.

The vast vision of Hustle’s dance floor reflects the moment of birth in the early ’70s. Even when the Vietnam War split it in two, civil rights, homosexual rights and women’s rights opened up American culture.

People were looking for an escape route and felt empowered to express themselves. At a club in New York City where the hustle was developed, they found a space for that expression. “There was no gap between blacks, whites, gays, straights, rich and poor,” famous hustle dancer Maria Torres told Abdiel. In an interview On Instagram.

While other ballroom dances have a history of same-sex partners, hustle dances are deeper and wider. Accepting women as partners — Torres has become famous for her professionals who lead both men and women — is especially rare. The vast, cosmic-eating posture of the hustle, with its arms fully extended from its elbows, is also unusual in ballroom dancing.

“Hustle is free,” Torres told Abdiel.

When Abdiel accepted the liberation of Hustle, the crowd of Hustle accepted Abdiel. Mutual friends of the scene played a matchmaker between Abdiel and Christine Bendur, 49. Christine Bendur is a longtime hustle dancer with a wealth of Broadway and ballet resumes. According to Bendur, the pair’s extensive dance experience allowed them to “spend this magical playtime” on the floor, blending hustle with modern dance, jazz and ballroom.

Abdiel and Bendur started playing together, both wearing heels and choreographing the leads back and forth. In 2019, they brought Hustle’s gender-neutral approach to a highly gendered world of competitive ballroom dancing. National Dance Council of America PartnershipLeaders and followers, regardless of the dancer’s gender or genderAbdiel and Bendur competed as the first professional gender-neutral couple in the ballroom, fluidly switching between leads and follow several times during each dance.

“I think we’re the third to last love,” Abdiel said with a laugh. “The award was that people saw it happen.” A documentary about the pair’s competitive ballroom experience, “FollowLeadLOVE“Is currently in production.

Abdiel and Bendul were scheduled to attend other ballroom events. However, in February 2020, Abdiel’s father died, and a month later, a pandemic wiped out the dance calendar. Lost Abdiel returns to ballroom dancing.

“I remember dancing with my family at home. How much I liked the feeling of dancing in the community,” they said. “That’s a big thing I missed in my stage career.”

The Dance is a life series Born from the need for a joint celebration. In the early days of the pandemic, when the club was still closed, Abdiel and DJ Natasha Diggs hosted a virtual dance party that brought together hustle dancers from around the world. In the spring of 2021, they took the party offline at their first event at the Bethesda Fountain.

They chose the fountain not only because of its convenience (centralized and outdoor, so it’s Covid-friendly), but also because of the importance of making history a mess. “The fountain was a place during the summer of 1975, 1976 and 1977,” said Willy Estrada, 65, a pioneer of the hustle and author of the book “The Dancing Gang of the South Bronx.” I am. “We danced all night on Saturday, had breakfast in the morning, walked to the fountain, and danced there all day.”

The laid-back Dance Is Life party reflects the spirit of Hustle’s early Liberal Party. “The first one didn’t even have a table for DJs, so the pretzel guy gave us a box,” Diggs said. “I’ll do it completely myself. But after being isolated, I felt the importance of this moment to share the joy of partner dancing.”

Teaching has become a particularly important part of Abdiel’s Hustle mission. Prior to the pandemic, they and Bendul led a gender-neutral hustle class at Gibney and The Juilliard, showing students both ways of teaching and following. As an instructor at the University of Washington with a master’s degree in dance, Abdiel has developed a lab that transforms a dance studio into something like a club.Live DJs, disco balls, balloon-covered ceilings (like DJ David Mancuso) Famous 1970s party in the loft). The goal is to reflect the way Hustle first learned through observation and improvisation on the dance floor. “It’s all about evoking playfulness,” Abdiel said.

With the Do The Hustle project, Abdiel is bringing the Hustle to the realm of concerts without losing sight of its roots. An ongoing show is scheduled at Jacobs Pillow, and during a series of residency as part of Guggenheim’s Works & Process program, Abdiel is developing an event in three parts. Dance class. And a big dance party.

However, the center of their work has always been the ballroom dance floor. This is also the place where you are most likely to come across them. The next Dance Is Life Party at Central Park is scheduled for July 11th. If you come, Abdiel will not let you leave without a dance.

“Such joint healing and celebration, that’s the heart of everything I do,” they said. “I want to keep doing that until I die.”