COCAINE BALLET: STORYBOARD P

Words by fayemi shakur l Images by Akintola Hanif

Watch HYCIDE's Storyboard P collaboration video here.

"An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one." - Charles Horton Cooley

Storyboards are used by illustrators and animators to create motion pictures. Twenty-two year old street dancer, Saalim, does the same thing with dance. With an otherworldly anime-like style that’s futuristic and fascinating, he becomes the storyboard, mirroring a journey through love, pain and ambition, a style he calls “cocaine ballet.” His aliases, Story Basquiat, Storyboard P, and Profess-SOAR, like his art, are all metaphors. “We always in the lab cooking up shit,” he says. He’s brilliant, but being edified isn’t his thing. He just wants people to know the place from which his expression comes.

Storyboard is heavy on slang, his preferred language. Ask him how he’s doing and he’ll say, “Sun rays. You tryna sun gaze?” Ask him how he feels about being popular and he’ll tell you, “I’m not into being too mixy.” Ask him about his life and his art and you might as well cancel your plans for the day and prepare to be won over.

“I didn’t really have any friends growing up,” he says. We talk about growing up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, about his brother who had a mental illness and tried to stab him, his schizophrenic mother, and his womanizing father who taught him how to hustle. In spite of those challenges, his love for his family is evident. Now those experiences fuel his process and ambition. “I always wanted to find a way to validate my voice,” he explains.

A spontaneous urge to take over the dance floor at a sixth grade dance broke him out of his shell. Almost instantly he went from loner to insanely popular, doing shows, sought after by former crushes and envied by neighborhood enemies. By the time he was 12, he had a 19-year-old girlfriend and he had been shot at by some jealous kids around his way. Then his childhood dance partner, Travis, was murdered in front of him, forcing him to take stock of his life. “That shit gives you trauma. I became more spiritual after that.”

It was an intense life for a kid, and his struggles were just beginning. He was later diagnosed with both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Sufferers of bipolar disorder are often highly creative and equally sensitive. Story considers his mental illness an enhancement, not something that he allows to hold him back. “When I couldn’t be happy or sad, it just felt like a crash. I didn’t have balance. I always feel disconnected naturally; usually I’m in a separate realm. When someone interacts with me and I feel like we connect, they can take me out of that realm,” he says. “When you are an empathetic person, you’re like a sponge. I can feel everyone’s pain. I’m a channeler. Channeling is when you can control possession. Possession is when you can’t control it. I learned to put my emotions in a pocket and isolate them so I wouldn’t feel them. So, for me, being schizophrenic turns into multi-tasking, I learned how to channel it into my craft and control it. That part of me is in my art, playing with it and seeing where the buttons are. It’s like me being my own therapist, the controller, the manipulator, stripping it and getting inside it, against my own will sometimes. I think we’re all more gifted that we allow ourselves to become.”

Fond of symbols, storytelling and solitude, Story believes in the importance of controlling how he communicates. With his animated dance style, like stop motion, in many ways he isolates emotion when he performs. In contemporary dance, it’s called “pedestrian motion,” movements that emulate real life. “A lot of my pieces have that sympathy of Black pain, meant to be made into epic art. To me, the highest form of communication in art is visual. That means dance is higher than music. It’s a world full of symbols. Even the words you read can be visual when they dance around in your head.”

He speaks of his love of literature and books like The Catcher in the Rye and the work of philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, which taught him how to think for himself. “My first passion was literature. I construct the way I dance as a thought. I write out a sentence in my mind and create visual gestures to explain what’s in my mind. Like a sentence, I’m just putting the gestures together to explain where I’m at mentally, emotionally. It all stems from my writing,” he says. “I feel like there are a lot of people who overlook my voice, the details in my art. For a dancer it’s harder because people connect dancers to things like being frail, being soft, being gay, and not relatable to certain struggles like pain and masculinity. When people see a dancer dancing they don’t connect it to them having a voice and having something to say. If I was a rapper who came from some project area, I could look the same, but they would respect me different. That’s the type of dynamic that I struggle with.”

“The undertones of some of my movements have that mystique and seduction, gliding like a woman. My style is androgynous. Sometimes it’s abrupt and jagged. Sometimes it’s like wandering, sometimes it’s a statement. Sometimes it’s exaggerated like an exclamation mark. Each song is a conversation, expressed differently.”

As a young teen Story was introduced to The Broadway Dance Center, a prestigious school of the arts in Manhattan. He shunned it though because he was more fascinated by what was happening in the street.

In 2009, Story catapulted to legendary status among his peers when he battled R&B star Omarion during a dance session. It had never been done before, a street dancer vs. a major pop star. He landed a small role in Beyonce’s If I Were A Boy video and a VH-1 show White Boys in the Hood. But his pivotal moment, he says, came when he was invited to showcase his performance art to the tunes of two Marvin Gaye songs, Save the Children and I Want You, at Sadler’s Wells Theater, UK’s leading dance house in London last spring. “It was memorable because while certain people don’t validate me over here, over there they saw me as definitive.”

After the Omarion battle, the creator from the group The Bullits, Jeymes Samuel, reached out to Story wanting to work with him. Samuel asked renowned photographer Marc Baptiste to direct a short video, a performance piece set to a Bullits song, Close Your Eyes. “I would define his style as part mime, improv and poetry in motion. It’s like he’s having an outer body experience with mad strength and control. I thought he was pure, untapped genius! He was very conceptual, he explained the story, then made it come to life with his movements, it was crazy,” says Baptiste.

“What we do is organic, not props. It’s warrior shit. It’s all the shit I been through, connecting it all back to that cry. There’s a cry every time you dance. My process when I have nothing is harder and I have more focus,” Story explains.

There are stories about him being homeless but for some, he says, “homelessness is a culture, a choice to live a nomadic life.” He travels often, performing whenever there’s a genuine call. “There’s a part of me that doesn’t like to be homebound. When I was younger I would ride my bike to the park and just want to stay there. It comes from me just wanting to be away. I was so used to exploring and being out in the street. I always had somewhere to go but there was a time when I couldn’t be home. I developed these gypsy habits, being more comfortable with strangers, and wanting to sleep at other people’s houses.

“I have a team around me and people who help me but I’m independent. I need to be respected as an artist. I’m self-made. People come to me like, ‘Just be a street dancer.’ They don’t expect you to have a brain. I think they think of Beat Street when they think of a street dancer,” he says, breaking into a sarcastic but comical pop-lock freestyle. “A lot of street dancers come from gangs trying to communicate through dance. It’s shit that came up off of the corners. I know my history so I come with a lot of strength. That’s the street in me. That’s the rugged in me.”

“But I gotta go back to the trap,” he says. Although that too is part of his reality, he has his eyes set on the future. “I want to become an established artist so that I have enough to live off of, thrive and help others. [I want to] show other artists how to create. I want my work to be timeless and to show dualities from the streets to Carnegie Hall seats,” says Storyboard.

It ain’t hard to tell he’s already on his way.