Casanova Wins Over Crowds at Brooklyn Renaissance

The rich history of Brooklyn has made countless contributions to the realm of urban youth culture, with b-boys breakdancing and MCs rocking the crowd while their DJs juggled beats behind them.

Yet before the true emergence of hip-hop in New York in the late 1970s, a seminal generation of youngsters was uprocking their way off of the streets and onto the dancefloor.

Among the pioneering practitioners of uprocking - a style of dance that emerged in Bushwick to a soundtrack of funk and conga drumming - Ralph Casanova stands distinctly tall.

Casanova performed with his Dynasty Rockers uprock crew as a guest at the Black Brooklyn Renaissance Conference at Brooklyn College this past Saturday, hosted by the H. Wiley Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music and the Brooklyn Arts Council.

"Even as a little kid, if you had talent they'd put you in the middle of the dance floor," said Casanova, who is more commonly known as King Uprock, the leader of the Dynasty Rockers.

Casanova was lucky to have come from a family with a strong musical background. His father played with legendary mambo musician Tito Puente and his mother was known for her dancing skills.

As gang activity escalated in New York City, Casanova, a Puerto Rican American from the Bronx who moved to Brooklyn in 1969, watched his fellow teenagers succumbing to death at the hands of gang violence.

"A lot of Puerto Ricans were dying, brothers were dying," said Casanova. "People were fighting for territory they didn't even own."

"I mean you could say you own the corner, but we all know who owns the corner - the city," he said.

While playing games like stickball and skelly on the streets of Bushwick as a kid, he suddenly noticed what he thought were gang members doing a strange kind of dance that looked a lot like fighting.

"I found out there was a dance and it was called the rock," he said.

"What happened was that they were trying to get the gangs from fighting into dancing, to battle against each other."

This rocking was an early precursor of breakdancing, in which dancers shook their bodies with sharp jerks to the music or drumbeat.

An integral part of rocking, as practiced by these former gang members, was the Apache line formation. Rival uprockers would square off, attempting to embarrass the other with a series of "burns," simulated acts of violence carried out without touching the other dancer, meant to prove one's dominance on the dancefloor.

"My mother used to say to me, 'What are you doing?' And I'd say Im doing this rocking thing! You gotta take the guy's head like this and embarrass him!" reminisced Casanova with a self-conscious chuckle.

"She said, 'You know what, learn to dance. The dance is more important in it's expression.'"

By studying other great dancers, Casanova was able to see the art form behind the exuberant moves he was learning on the playground with other uprockers.

"I saw what was really going on," he said. "I really understood what they were trying to say through their dance.

"A graffiti artists, he's gonna write graffiti, and hes gonna show his art form. A singer's gonna express himself through his voice. People playing an instrument, they're expressing themselves playing the instrument, and you feel what they're playing, and you know that, wow - he's really doing what he likes."

Bitten by the bug, Casanova started practicing all forms of dance, from rock to funk and even the hustle. "Dancing was very important. That's what made your name," said Casanova.

"If you just waited to rock, and that's all you did - you'd be waiting all night."

Casanova and his dance crew, the Dynasty Rockers, were some of the best to ever do it in Brooklyn. Perhaps the biggest part of uprocking was the battle, and rival crews would face off for each others' crew t-shirts, or sometimes even for the opposing crew's name and members.

And while he did have his mistakes a a young man with guns and violence, he takes what he does very seriously, even now.

"I'm gonna be 40 years old," he said. "I still dance on the dancefloor with young kids, I don't have a problem with it. I thank God for the gift that I can still do this."

As a pioneer of this style of dance that is uniquely Brooklyn in its practice, Casanova never forgets to acknowledge the history of the art form.

"When we start doing things, we don't give credit to those who we first saw," said Casanova. "Nobody can say, well I was the first one to do this...you cant say that because there's people always doing something."

He pointed to examples as famous as Michael Jackson, who got his commercially named moonwalk from the street dance move, the backslide.

"Young people see him doing the moonwalk and they say, "Oh, Michael invented that.' But they don't know it's not called the moonwalk. If you're on the moon, you're going forwards, not backwards," he laughed.

Casanova isn't shy about his fame, yet he lives these days to set a positive example, and give back to the youth whose shoes he was once in out on the streets of Brooklyn.

"I'll tell you man, I know Jay-Z, I know all these famous rappers. But when the ask me to do a video, I say no.

"And they say, 'But we're paying you!' And I say you ain't paying me because I don't support that. I don't wanna tell the kids to do that."

"It's you guys who're gonna be the next generation to keep this alive...What it's all about is teaching one, and let's see what the other person can do with it."