Balancing Roles: A DJ and Dancer Combines Two Passions
For Randy Bernal, aka DJ Wish One, playing music and dancing have always been intertwined. While it might seem difficult to pursue both activities simultaneously, Bernal has been able to successfully combine them, working as a DJ and a dancer for professional companies. In fact, he says, the two pursuits go hand in hand, giving him deeper insights into each and boosting his skills across the board.
These days, Bernal, 34, makes a living playing music and dancing with two of Los Angeles’ best hip hop performance groups, Groovaloos and Jabbawockeez. But his interest in music and movement began a very long time ago.
“One of my older sisters had a birthday with a DJ, and they were b-boying,” or break dancing, recalls Bernal. “I was this little kid in Pampers, and I automatically fell in love with it. I’d never seen real dancing up close like that—and I’d never seen anybody control music like that. It blew my mind.” What he loved about DJing was the power of the person behind the equipment: “Music has an amazing way of controlling people’s emotions—you can make them excited or relaxed.”
For the next few years in his hometown of San Jose, Bernal and his friends played around arranging music and dancing to it. “There were no dance classes, no way to learn it except from movies or a few music videos. So we would get together and do it on my porch or backyard,” he says. It wasn’t until high school that he got involved with either activity in an organized way.
After dancing and playing music through high school and into college—and successfully resisting choosing between the two activities—Bernal wound up performing with Culture Shock, a non-profit hip hop dance group that has branches in cities across the country, including the Bay Area. Joining Culture Shock changed Bernal’s life: by traveling around the state and performing in a range of shows, he came into contact with a wide variety of hip hop aficionados.
“That kind of changed the game for me,” he reports. “It opened up my mind and eyes to doing different types of shows, and that’s how I met the rest of the guys from Jabbawockeez.”
The group didn’t exist at that time, of course. Its 11 members were performers from around the state who bonded through a shared love of hip hop and eventually decided to form a group. The name came from a poem in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass”; it refers to a beast that’s only there when viewed out of the corner of your eye, Bernal says.
“We played on that mysterious vibe,” he says. When performing, the dancers usually wear blank, white masks to keep the audience from choosing favorite members or over-focusing on ethnicity (a majority of the Jabbawockeez are Asian, including Bernal, who is Filipino). As the group’s DJ since it was established, Bernal picked electronic music that was “mysterious and glitchy at the same time” for the overriding tone.
Jabbawockeez had its first show in 2003. By then, Bernal had moved to Los Angeles in order to improve his b-boy moves. “I really wanted to learn to pop and lock and do freestyle [improvisation] the right way,” he says.
In LA, he met the Groovaloos, one of the city’s most elite hip hop dance companies, and was duly intimidated. “These guys are the best of the best; I’d seen footage of them and thought, ‘Wow, I want to be like them,’” comments Bernal. He dropped in on a company rehearsal, but was overwhelmed. “I was super duper shy—I felt comfortable with my dancing, but felt like I was at the bottom of the totem pole in LA. I’d just sit in a corner and stretch out.”
A friend had told Bernal, “If you want to get better, surround yourself with people who are better than you and it’ll rub off,” so he continued to frequent rehearsals. Finally, Groovaloo members found out about his music skills and invited him to get more involved, and he eventually began dancing with the group, too.
Nowadays, Bernal lives in the Bay Area and DJs and dances for both companies. Both groups do a wide variety of performances, from benefits and awards shows to competitions. The Groovaloos recently won the NBC dance competition, “Superstars of Dance,” and Jabbawockeez just returned from six weeks on tour with the New Kids on the Block.
Bernal spent most of his time on tour as a dancer, but he helped to arrange much of the music featured in the show. That’s typical for both groups, he says. “If I’m not DJing on stage, I probably had something to do with putting the tracks together.”
DJing isn’t just about putting a CD in a machine and pressing play, at least when Bernal does it. In the studio, he arranges the music—with the help of other company members—and rehearses with the equipment. Later, during the performance, he’ll set up a space onstage where he can DJ live next to the dancers. “It adds a whole new feel to the performance,” he says. “You see dancers and the music actually happening onstage.”
Most of the music used in the performances is set beforehand, but there’s also time allocated for solo freestyle, allowing dancers and the DJ to show their stuff. During those moments, Bernal chooses his music on the spot, playing to both the crowd and the dancer in front of him. That’s when being a DJ and dancer really comes in handy. “Being a dancer, I have a sense of how it should flow,” he points out. “I get to know what particular dancers are like, and I try to get them really excited when they go out to solo. You have to be able to tell where the energy is going.”
Bernal has other opportunities for creative input onstage, too—things like scratching records and adding other sound effects. “I still love all that, because it’s a fun and cool way to express yourself,” confides Bernal. “It’s like you’re playing a musical instrument and you do a drum solo.”
He confesses to having a wall of shelves full of vinyl records at home, but these days he doesn’t take any with him to shows. Instead, he uses a new program called Scratch Live that was developed by Serato software company. Using the program, he can recreate all of the sounds onstage that DJs once made using vinyl records, like scratching, stuttering and spinning the disk backwards. It isn’t cheap: the software requires a tableful of equipment—a mixer, turntables and a laptop—to work. But Bernal says Scratch Live has a lot of competition; a similar but cheaper program is M-Audio’s Torq, which also provides an arsenal of sound options.
Lately, he’s gotten interested in other computer programs, too. Bernal’s newest thing is music production, which involves creating a song from zero, starting with laying down a beat, then adding a baseline and a melody. The programs he uses are Ableton Live and Reason; they’re expensive, but Bernal says they’re worth it. “If you can afford it, it’s going to change your life. It’s part of being a DJ—a lot of good producers are also DJs, and the other way around.”
That last comment comes not from Bernal the onstage hip hop DJ, but from his alter ego, Bernal the teacher and mentor. This summer, he’s been working at summer camps, teaching hip hop and breaking to junior high and high school kids. He loves it. “These kids are awesome—everybody’s really hungry for it, ready to work. It’s a great outlet for them.”
Thinking about his students, Bernal reflects on the role hip hop played in his childhood. “Growing up the way I did, it was a way to get away from all the negativity, from gang violence,” he says. “It gave me a life. Now I want to give these kids something I didn’t have, and that’s a teacher.”
Even when he’s teaching dance, Bernal tries to incorporate musicality and elements of DJing. He plays a wide variety of genres in his classes. “The more eclectic your [musical] selections, the more creative you can be [as a choreographer]—and it’ll give you more options,” he points out. He also tries to listen closely to songs, dissecting them by separating the beat from other effects or lyrics, then choreographing to individual sounds.
But Bernal doesn’t need to introduce the kids to the magic of music single-handedly. Things have changed since he was a kid, and now DJ classes are common; there’s even a Scratch DJ Academy in LA, New York and Miami.
Lots of other things have changed, too. Reality dance shows on television have shifted the nature and perception of dance—and the music that goes with it—and opened a lot of doors for new styles and performers. “Back in the day, people would put you down when you mixed styles, but now there’s this whole new movement of hybrid styles, and a whole new thing about musicality,” says Bernal, who’s excited about playing a role in this new environment. “The future? I think it’ll be amazing.”