Brian Henry is a biblical dancer. It’s not just that he’s intimidatingly big and muscular and has a Moses-like beard. His dance is rooted in a street style called crump but has an ancient gravitational pull. He standing in profile with his chest tilted forward may be an Assyrian sculpture. Breathing like a dragon and opening his eyes, he could be the clay he inspired, the first man.
Or so it appears in his solo “Song,” which he co-wrote with choreographer Andrea Miller, and is 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 New York’s Klump, performing on a concert dance stage is an opportunity to show that Klump is “a dance form that should be held at the same level.” he said. said recently.
But Henry, also known as HallowDreamz, hasn’t changed how he dances. “Just because I’m telling a different story doesn’t mean I have to step out of my process,” he said. It’s just that he’s used to people seeing him differently before and after he dances.
Henry was speaking at Herbert von King Park in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. It is not far from where he lived and spent most of his youth. Not all, but most. He lived in each borough of New York City. “My mother is on drugs and I was born with drugs in my body,” he said. He was placed in a nursing home. His mother then regained custody, but lost it again because of his addiction. When he was nine or ten, he reunited with her in Bed-Stuy.
I discovered clamps online in 2004. This format had been established in Los Angeles only a few years earlier. It’s an improvisational, immersive, combat-based style that combines intense pantomime and stomping, chest-pumping movements, and emphatic arm swings.
For Henry, the connection was instant. “It was men like me,” he said. “They were aggressive, masculine, fighting men. Fighting was one of the first things I learned to defend myself on walks to school and on the playground. I fought, I fought, I felt pain.”
At the same time, he added, “it was a crowd of people who wanted something positive.” It came out of gang culture but channeled in a more spiritual, more healing way. It felt just like home, but just better. ”
Crump became an obsession, an escape, a discipline. Online he learned from videos and his DVDs and Henry worked as hard as he could to improve. And others began to notice, too.
“People started looking at me differently,” Henry said. “I wasn’t thought of as just a thug. I was a dancer’s kid. It showed people that I could be disciplined and could be good at something.” It was exciting – “doors opened and I began to be welcomed into a previously unwelcoming space” – but it was also bittersweet. It made him aware of how others saw him.
Henry found some friends who were interested in clamping. Joshua Staton, called Nightmare and gave him a dance name. (“He’s Nightmare, I’d rather be Dreams”) Together they began building a crump scene in New York. Some West Coast crump dancers questioned their authenticity and skill. However, Henry said, “Hard-working East Coast dancers like myself have proven that we are better than many of the West Coast’s best dancers.”
“My roots are the same as the founder of Crump,” he added. But he said he cherished the time when he “didn’t know exactly what crump was,” when he was alone copying and inventing from video. Because the experiment “created the sauce that made me different.”
Henry’s biggest confidence came when he met Joartis Ratti at an audition for a Madonna video circa 2015. big mijo, he was one of its originators and said that the people dancing always looked like Henry. “Mijo was like, ‘Brother, I’ve been following you all along, I love your work, you’re Little Mijo,'” Henry said.
There was no career path for crump dancers in Los Angeles or New York. Henry had to share the water himself.he made a name for himself compete in a dance battle But also as a teacher. “I have taught everywhere, including ballet schools,” he said. (He worked nights as a security guard and still works as a personal trainer.)
This is how he became New York’s most famous crump dancer, the go-to guy, he said. “If you see young dancers, they have either taken my class or taken from my students.”
As for work other than battle scenes, lots of auditions and lots of rejections. “I just had to keep going to find a place that suited me,” he said.he was hired for “Bitch, I’m Madonna” and other music videos.he gave be TED talk. He produced and collaborated on the Guggenheim Museum’s ‘Works & Process’ show. He has made cameo appearances in choreographer Bill T. Jones’ projects at the Park Avenue Armory and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and he describes him as “one of the hidden treasures, someone who should be cynical but isn’t.” said.
And this time it’s a collaboration with Miller. When she met Henry for the first time at her benefit performance, she said during a Juilliard rehearsal that she felt “the presence of lights and thunder”. But she also felt a kinship. “We dance because it’s part of our survival system.” She was worried that it would seem like “Disgusting, I’ve seen it so many times”.
Henry said he had many such experiences. “Just put me next to someone doing a pirouette,” he says. “Or people try to frame me, and if they don’t fit me in a box, I can’t dance.” But working with Miller was “a real collaboration.”
Mr. Miller agreed. “He’s a thought partner and his creativity is limitless,” she said. Many of Miller’s offerings were concepts and ideas about the prehistoric origins of art, which were frequent topics for her. She doesn’t put Henry in a box, but frames him with wooden planks. This is to make it easier for viewers to see what she calls Henry’s “subtle movements,” and it also serves as a canvas for artist Sharone Halevy, who paints on board during the exhibition. . performance.
But it’s not just the framework that distinguishes “The Song” from Henry’s previous formal appearances. That’s “all they gave me,” he said. This is “my everything”.
And who is it? A devoted father of two teenagers. A mentor who helps create “a safe space for men to express themselves emotionally” and teach others how to “get through the turmoil.” A man who believes his most important mission is to “spread what he knows in his life to alleviate the hurt and turmoil that people go through.” The most important thing is “next to getting the dance form right”.
