Reykjavík Grapevine - 26.09.2014, Side 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.”