Storyboard P

 
 

Still, Dreams are Colder than Death (2013) Directed by Arthur Jafa

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Born Saalim Muslim, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn (NY), Storyboard P. is a street dancer and a star of flex, what The New Yorker describes as “a form of street dance characterized by jarring feats of contortion, pantomime, and footwork that simulates levitation.” He has been featured in and inspired groundbreaking art videos by Kahlil Joseph (Until the Quiet Comes, 2013 and Fly Paper, 2017), Arthur Jafa (Dreams are colder than Death, 2013 and 4:44, 2017), and has worked with artists such as Jay-Z and Erykah Badu. Writings in The New Yorker, The Guardian and The New York Times, have attributed his eclectic style to the appropriation of other forms of street dance—such as “the furious gestures of Los Angeles krumpers, the en pointe wizardry of Memphis jookers—mixed in with “classical moves, going from a sashaying vogue strut to a balletic flourish,” [1] as well as the gestural voguing of New York’s LBGT subculture in the 80s.[2] James Bartlett, the executive director of the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art, in Brooklyn, has compared him to Jean-Michel Basquiat, for his ability to link “the street and the soul, on one side, and quote-unquote ‘high art,’ on the other.”[3]

Influenced also by Jerome Robbins (“West Side Story”), the Nicholas Brothers, and, above all, Michael Jackson, Storyboard P conceptualizes his work specifically in relation to the “visual effects” he intends to produce, that is, by both anticipating and preempting the way the camera lens might render his dancing. One of Storyboard’s biggest inspirations, in fact, is stop-motion animation and he likes to disrupt his seemingly “impossible” fluid motion with tremors and twitches, so that he appears to flicker like a figure in a zoetrope or a glitching online video. As he has said, “Doing animation, you’re just cramping and uncramping.”

The practice, form and aesthetic of filmmaking is thus central to the conceptualization of his own practice; it inspires the chosen moniker, and fuels his desire to be recognized as a “visual recording artist.” Furthermore, by framing his own dancing style with reference to stop-motion animation, Storyboard locates his performance in a complex and provocative ground between inanimate object and soulful movement[4], assertive artistic control and embodied avatar[5], strategic liquidity and calculated pause. This important tension between inanimate object and soulful movement becomes apparent in the “Afro-cosmic” workings of “On My Mind,” where Storyboard P’s specific dance style and his subjective connection to his art object of the body works to literalize the relation between the other featured artists and their art objects in the form of bodily flow. 

-Alessandra Raengo, January 17, 2018 with input from Lauren Cramer, Jenny Gunn and the liquid blackness group


[1] Jonah Weiner, “The Impossible Body: Storyboard P, the Basquiat of street dancing,” The New Yorker (January 6, 2014): 
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/apr/13/storyboard-p-pretty-animated-basquiat-street-dance-jay-z[3] Ibid.
[4] Vivian Sobchack, “Animation and Automation, or, the Incredible Efforfulness of Being,” Screen 50, no. 4 (2009): 375-91.
[5] Uri McMillan, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (NYU Press, 2015).

liquid blackness in Conversation with Thomas DeFrantz (on Storyboard P)

Still, Until the Quiet Comes (2013) Directed by Kahlil Joseph

Still, Until the Quiet Comes (2013) Directed by Kahlil Joseph