Heels over head

A local street dance legend got street cred of a different kind on Friday. The Hollywood intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Argyle Avenue was officially dubbed “Don Campbellock Square” as part of the first Los Angeles Urban Dance Festival.

Renowned as the creator of the distinctive street dance form Locking, Campbellock (born Campbell) also founded the popular and influential L.A.-based 1970s dance group the Lockers. But more important than the street sign, his achievements earned him the pleasure of seeing the Hollywood Palladium filled with young people taking Locking lessons and entering competitions. “When I see you, I see me,” he said, visibly moved, to a room full of street dancers.

But Locking scarcely proved the whole story at the three-day festival -- not with plenty of Popping, Hip-Hopping, B-Boying (and -Girling) and freestyle street dancing on view in the Palladium’s main hall, side rooms and lobby. On Saturday, for instance, Poppin’ Chuck, Terry Bixler and Fresh taught simultaneous classes to 20 to 30 students each in various locations while other dancers in twos and threes exchanged moves in a kind of informal dance marketplace.

“Once you start breaking, you’re part of a family,” Fresh told his students. “All of us are part of each other, so it’s possible to create something similar when we dance. Creativity is going to bounce off all of us.”

The weekend proved his point over and over. The more experienced dancers at the Palladium had long since adapted street dance idioms into personal statements: sometimes forceful and even confrontational but also playful, refined, experimental and downright unpredictable.

For instance, Nijo, a self-taught 18-year-old graphic design student from Milwaukee, specialized in asymmetrical contorted balances: his legs knotted, his torso twisted and all of him held off the floor, balanced at a precarious angle on the flat of his hand. Kasiem Khalid, a 21-year-old martial arts master from Phoenix, tried everything -- aerial flips, backbends, high-velocity turns, robotic walks -- always exuding star quality, and only failing when he tried to match the number of head spins per minute in the Guinness Book of Records. (He needed 53 but executed only 44.)

Street dance may have started and developed as a man’s game -- a way of putting competition in a context other than physical combat -- but the festival featured a number of powerful women soloists and groups. Khalid’s crewmate Luciana, a 28-year-old student of martial arts, gymnastics, jazz dance and ballet, acknowledges that male feats currently set the standard for street dance and “I have to work up to what guys can do.”

“But I’m trying to learn all aspects of dance and blend them,” she said, “and I definitely want to show my feminine side.”

Besides North American crews, the festival attracted dancers from Asia and Europe, including Gemini, a 29-year-old professional dancer from Paris influenced by the Nicholas Brothers, Gene Kelly and Mikhail Baryshnikov, but involved with street dancing because of what he called “its power inside.”

“It’s a very rich culture, American culture,” Gemini said, “and people like Don Campbellock are heroes in France because they gave us something to do over there. Nowadays, dancing is like the Internet: Everybody learns from everybody else. But you must do it with respect and in a positive way.”

This positive emphasis took many forms throughout the festival, from original Lockers dancer Skeeter Rabbit declaring, “Before this dance, I was nothing. It changed my life,” to hip-hop MC Prince Whipper Whip listing everything the festival didn’t have or want: “No alcohol, no drugs, no guns and definitely no need for security.”

Choreographer Shane Sparks even publicly apologized for the obscenities in the recorded accompaniment to one of his pieces, explaining that he hadn’t noticed the problem until after the performance. “We never want to bring anything negative into this,” he said. As tireless festival executive producer Crescendo Ward commented, “We’re doing this festival for kids. I can listen to anything myself, but I tell everyone not to allow profanity in the music -- to use the [expurgated] radio versions, if they have to.”

Perhaps the most primal expression of the festival’s mission came in a written manifesto about mastering the body from veteran Locking teacher Greg “Campbellock Jr.” Pope. For a kid growing up in an American ghetto, mastering the environment is impossible, but his or her moves and the ability to communicate something deep and essential can be mastered and then honed to as fine an edge as any dance anywhere.

That commitment to mastery found its most resplendent showcase in the dance contests held during the festival: the Hip-Hop Dance Awards on Saturday and the American Street Dance Championships on Sunday. The former prioritized face-to-face solo confrontations, the latter formal group choreography.

Inevitably, some of the entries -- and winners -- capitalized on slick, commercialized virtuosity, but others stayed real enough in attack and street smarts to remind everyone where all this energy originated. Moreover, a pithy rap sheet from the Grafittie Art Coalition put into rhymed couplets an all-caps warning to balance all the exuberance and athleticism:

“REMEMBER THIS IS OUR CULTURE DON’T LET IT GET STOLEN / DON’T TURN COMMERCIAL DON’T LET YOUR HEAD GET SWOLLEN.”

Swollen feet, maybe, after dance-filled eight-hour sessions on Saturday and Sunday -- but not heads, not even those with whole bodies spinning furiously on top of them.