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COCAINE BALLET: Storyboard P

Words by fayemi shakur l Images by Akintola Hanif

Watch HYCIDE's Storyboard P collaboration video here.

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"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 thats
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. Hes
brilliant, but being edified isnt 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 hes doing and hell say, Sun rays.
You tryna sun gaze? Ask him how he feels about being popular and hell tell you, Im 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 didnt 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 couldnt be happy or sad, it just felt like a crash. I didnt have balance. I
always feel disconnected naturally; usually Im 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, youre like a sponge. I can feel everyones pain. Im a channeler. Channeling is when you can
control possession. Possession is when you cant control it. I learned to put my emotions in a pocket
and isolate them so I wouldnt 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. Its like me being my own therapist, the controller, the
manipulator, stripping it and getting inside it, against my own will sometimes. I think were 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, its 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. Its 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 whats in my mind. Like a sentence, Im just putting the gestures together to explain where
Im 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 its 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 dont 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. Thats 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 its abrupt and jagged. Sometimes its like wandering, sometimes its
a statement. Sometimes its exaggerated like an exclamation mark. Each song is a conversation,
expressed differently.
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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 Beyonces 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 Sadlers Wells Theater, UKs leading dance house in
London last spring. It was memorable because while certain people dont 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. Its like hes 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. Its warrior shit. Its all the shit I been through, connecting it
all back to that cry. Theres 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 theres a genuine call. Theres a part
of me that doesnt 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 couldnt be home. I developed
these gypsy habits, being more comfortable with strangers, and wanting to sleep at other peoples
houses.

I have a team around me and people who help me but Im independent. I need to be respected as an
artist. Im self-made. People come to me like, Just be a street dancer. They dont 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. Its shit that came up off of the corners. I know my history so I come with
a lot of strength. Thats the street in me. Thats 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 aint hard to tell hes already on his way.