WOODLAND HILLS : Dancers Behind Street Styles in the Spotlight

Creators of the body moves that spawned break-dancing and influenced such superstars as Michael Jackson gathered in Woodland Hills on Monday to film a documentary on the evolution of street dancing.

Legends of the 1970s underground dance scene--such as Don Campbell, who is credited by many with developing the move known as “locking”--sat in front of a video camera to talk about how they were hitting the dance floor with innovative steps long before the 1983 movie “Flashdance.”

Thomas Guzman-Sanchez, a member of the recording group Rhythm Tribe and a dancer himself from Reseda, said he wrote the one-hour documentary “to fill in that missing puzzle piece in pop culture” between 1970 and 1985.

Guzman-Sanchez said he hopes that the film, titled “The Master Underground Dancers of the Forgotten Era: Documentary of a Hard-Core Lifestyle” will air on public television.

Timothy Solomon, whose dance moniker was Poppin’ Pete, said during the taping session that he appeared in Michael Jackson’s video “Beat It” and even taught the superstar a few steps.

The man at the beginning of street dancing’s evolutionary chain, some say, is Campbell, a shy, 43-year-old former high school track athlete who started dancing just for fun, moving with his buddies to music from a jukebox at Los Angeles Trade Technical College.

In clumsy attempts to move to the “Funky Chicken” in the early 1970s, Campbell would point to people laughing at him, slip and pretend nothing happened, and freeze his arms into what became known as a “lock.” Soon, he was dancing on the television program “Soul Train.”

Guzman-Sanchez, 35, said he was inspired to imitate Campbell after seeing the older dancer on television. The teen-age Guzman-Sanchez and his friends followed Campbell’s steps and expanded on them by freezing the arms into a “break” and moving the body in a constant flow.

New York kids added gymnastic steps and head spins to the dance moves, which later became known as break-dancing and was popularized in movies and videos during the 1980s.

That mainstreaming, Sanchez said, hurt street dancing more than it helped. “It reduced it to a novelty where every little kid had a Nike suit on and a piece of cardboard in the front lawn.”