From Poplocking to Pirouettes: Desmond Richardson
Mixing ballet and breakdance is like mixing apples and spaceships. One seems as old as the Garden of Eden and comes from the royal courts of 14th-century France and Italy. The other, born in the streets of 1970s New York, is slightly younger than interplanetary travel. One prizes an erect spine and proper, pleasing lines, rigid discipline and supreme elitism. The other is all about remaining lyrical while collapsing, contorting and dislocating the frame, about maintaining a cool head atop a hot body. Mastering both would require a physical and cultural bilingualism. A dancer fluid enough to flow from the traditions of Baryshnikov and Nureyev to those of Crazy Legs and Mr. Wiggles. Someone like Desmond Richardson, considered by many the best dancer in America today.
"They're very different," says Richardson, who four years ago became the American Ballet Theater's first black principal dancer. "But you have to have exquisite control of your weight and your center. You have to move with clarity and force at the same time." He pushes back his short dreadlocks with a finely chiseled arm, muscles rippling up and down. Where many dancers are lean and sinewy, Richardson, 32, has wonderfully defined muscles that make women and sculptors swoon.
"I believe everything I dance, just like an actor," he says. In 1992, Richardson won a Bessie award (the Oscar of dance). He has performed with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and the Frankfurt Ballet, and on Broadway in "Fosse," for which he received a 1999 Tony nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Musical. Later this year, he'll make his film debut in the dance drama "Without a Word," with Patrick Swayze. The actor "didn't talk about "Dirty Dancing" much," Richardson says. "That was a social dance movie for the masses. This movie [is] more about the concert dance world."
When many of his dance peers were attempting their first pirouettes, Richardson was breakdancing on street corners or singing in the church choir (his grandmother was the choir director; his dad was an original member of the R&B group the Manhattans). He was 15 before he got serious about ballet, which is like entering medical school at 40. But like painters Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, he reached the highest levels of a fine art by applying lessons he learned in a street discipline. "His original training in poplocking is what makes him such a formidable dancer," says former Alvin Ailey dancer Danielle Gee, referring to a subset of breakdancing in which the dancers appear to lock and unlock the joints in staccato movements that are robotic yet lyrical. "If anyone has taken the tradition of the street into contemporary ballet, he has."
It took years for Richardson to find a way to fuse the two inside himself. He first laid eyes on breakdancing at a block party in Queens, N.Y., at age 10. "They were having a dance contest," he says, "and these three guys were poplocking all synchronized, and they turned it out. I told my mom, 'That's what I want to do.' " Richardson spent three years poplocking and used it in his audition for New York's High School for Performing Arts. It had made him so limber that he quickly adapted to the shapes of ballet, but the rigid technique seemed to snatch the joy from dancing.
Then, one afternoon at the Ailey School, he watched the company rehearse. "The girls came out moving from the gut with real passion," he recalls. "I saw how I could incorporate the passion I had from my street dancing with the technique I was learning. I saw how I could bring some magic to the stage."
Combining both techniques became a way of paying homage to generations past, to people like his grandmother Corene Spann, who worked as a maid at the famous City Center dance theater. She never was allowed to watch the dance. Before she died in 2000, at age 87, she saw dance quite often, and from the best seat in the house. "Whenever that curtain goes up," Richardson says, "I think about my grandmother, and I remember that what I'm doing is bigger than just myself."
Touré is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine.