Reykjavík Grapevine - 26.09.2014, Blaðsíða 21

Reykjavík Grapevine - 26.09.2014, Blaðsíða 21
Feature| Tourism 21 The Reykjavík Grapevine Issue 15 — 2014 Although contemporary hip hop culture is undeniably global in its scope, most people wouldn’t think of Iceland as a hotbed for street dance, one of hip hop’s most recogniz- able and fundamental off-shoots. And honestly, it’s not. Today there are—at a generous estimate—maybe 50 people actively involved in the street dance scene in Iceland, many of whom are kids and teens who are years away from seeing the inside of a nightclub. Nevertheless, two women at the forefront of Iceland’s street dance community—Nata- sha Monay Royal, a 41-year-old Brooklynite who is part of “the generation to start street dance,” and her former student, Brynja Pétursdóttir, a 29-year-old Icelander from the outlying Reykjavík neighbourhood of Breiðholt—have set themselves a rather formida- ble goal. That is, to not only create an entire dance culture from scratch in Iceland, but to also “do it properly,” instilling their students with an understanding of the foundations of hip hop culture and the street dance movement, a tradition that honestly could not be further removed from Iceland’s own cultural and political history. Given their very different back- grounds, Brynja and Natasha have, of course, taken very different ap- proaches to becoming Iceland’s veri- table street dance experts, and both have their own takes on where the culture currently stands and how it might (or might not) develop in the fu- ture. But as teachers, they both share a passionate belief in the importance of infusing their classes with histori- cal context and proper technique. “I could not teach ballet, so I do not advertise ballet,” Brynja states matter-of-factly. As far as she and Na- tasha see it, a lot of dance teachers in Iceland are trying to cash in on a fad without really knowing what they are doing. This has seemed all the more apparent following this year’s 'Ís- land’s Got Talent' (the Icelandic ver- sion of the popular TV franchise), in which Brynjar Dagur Albertsson, one of Natasha and Brynja’s students, per- formed a series of popping routines that won him ten million krónur. “It was funny when he won,” says Nata- sha, “He’s fifteen years old and you have dance schools calling him and asking him to teach. And he’s like, ‘I don’t know how to teach!’ But they ask him to come because it’s good for business. It makes street dance here un- balanced,” she ends. “And it’s never gonna grow if they keep doing it this way.” Stops and starts “I brought street dance to Iceland—I was the first person to teach it,” says Natasha. She explains that there had been a few break dancers who had come to Iceland before, people who, like her, learned to break dance at the very beginning. “But they left after less than a year,” she shrugs. “That’s why it’s still so fresh in Iceland. They left so early.” Of course, Natasha didn’t exactly plan to become Iceland’s one and only break dancer when she first arrived sixteen years ago. Rather, she came as a tourist. “I went to Kolaportið—there was a big jam there, some American DJ came,” she remembers. “I started dancing and everybody just stopped. Everybody just com- pletely froze. Like they’d never seen this before. But I just kept dancing and then the whole place was really crowding me, making me dance again and again. I was showing them moves and that’s when this guy came over and said his uncle owned a dance stu- dio. I started at his dance school and then went to [the downtown dance school] Kramhúsið, and I’ve been teaching there since.” But it wasn’t easy to funnel the en- thusiasm Natasha experienced at Ko- laportið into actual class attendance. Her first break dance classes had less than ten students. (Compare this to today, when she and Brynja have as many as 350 students between them.) Luckily, one of Natasha’s first stu- dents—and one of the most enthusi- astic ones, at that— was Brynja. “Teach- ing her, I knew that she had it in the heart,” Natasha re- members. “She was always there. It’s not a surprise to me that she’s where she is today, because she was always ded- icated.” It’s perhaps no wonder that Brynja was so enthusiastic about Natasha’s classes, since she had, ostensibly, been waiting for them for her whole life. “I remember being nine-years- old at my friend's house, sneaking into her older brother's video collec- tion to watch a show called Yo! MTV Raps that was aired on MTV after our bedtime,” Brynja remembers. “I had no idea who those people were, but I loved the music, the way they dressed and how they looked so, so, so cool. I was hooked on hip hop culture and soon got to reading, lis- tening and studying every bit of it that I could get my hands on. I waited for The Source magazine, XXL and Vibe to hit the shelves every month. I loved how TLC, Mary J. Blige and Aaliyah dressed and danced, and I tried to im- itate everything I saw in the videos. Without really paying much attention to it, I was always practicing some move, for example, the hand gestures when people rapped were so smooth and effortless. My friends did not un- derstand me at all—I clearly remem- ber being the odd one out and I always hated the music played at parties. I was a pain in the ass too, probably, try- ing to get my music played.” Brynja started taking belly-danc- ing classes when she was six years old, but was always on the look out for hip hop classes because she loved the music so much. “Finally, when I was fifteen, I found Natasha’s class,” she smiles. “I always helped her advertise. I al- ways put up posters in my school to make sure that the classes would stay open.” Less than five years later, Brynja and Natasha decided to start teaching together. “I started teaching when I was nineteen and that was out of pure desperation,” Brynja laughs. “There was nothing going on here.” She shakes her head. “Seriously. I just really wanted to create a dance class that I would want to go to. But oh my god, I was so nervous. I was building something from nothing. Nobody was doing it.” She gestures one hand to the left, one to the right. “Me and Natasha, we had to make it known that street dancing is this, not that. And that took years to get across, in part be- cause many studios advertised street dance and hip hop without having any teachers who were educated in those styles. We’ve kind of accom- plished that now—people see the dif- Back To Basics Brynja Pétursdóttir And Natasha Monay Royal Bring Street Dance To Iceland, One Step At A Time By Larissa Kyzer Photos by Matthew Eisman Continues on P.22 “They’re all so open. If you love the commu- nity and you love the culture, then they want to give you everything they have.”
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