First published in The Record, Dec. 29, 2022

With Strategy, The kings of subway dance endure

 They are stutter, they are flow, they are flip and jook and smile. This subway car is a realm of motion, and they its hurtling kings. For what kings endure without strategy? None on the surface of the earth, and none below.

Watch now Doc Jr. and D-Astro. Watch them claim the center of this L train car as it rolls downhill, under the East River, gaining speed. D-Astro’s Bluetooth speaker fills the enclosure with overloud music, a Calypso guitar tinkling over a bass beat and lyrics on repeat, “I can go/ I can go/ I can go ON.” D-Astro dances first. He flips forward. He flips back. He slides down the center pole, drops his right hand to the floor, and lifts both feet in the air. He hops a circle on one palm.

Surely this is chaos. What kind of person practices such lunacy? This is one of the longest tunnels between stations in the New York subway. The train may be going 40 miles an hour. One quick tap of the brakes might cause D-Astro’s arm to snap.

Peel your eyes from D-Astro’s magnetic moves. Check out Doc Jr. He is still. He is confident. He sees the plan unfolding.

D-Astro grasps a pole in each hand. He starts a back flip. But halfway round he stops, dangling his head inches above the floor.

Doc Jr. sees his cue.

He leaps. He squeezes his body through the gap created by D-Astro’s armpit. For a moment the dancers resemble a newborn tulip, bursting from its leaf enclosure.  

The handoff is complete. D-Astro cedes the stage. Doc Jr. takes control, as planned, back-flipping into a series of juggling tricks with his Adidas Superstar sneakers.

The lead car bursts into the station at Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn. D-Astro cuts the music. Both dancers reach for their heads. The kings turn their baseball caps into offering plates, open to receive.

“Thank you for your donations,” Doc Jr. and D-Astro shout in practiced unison, “Keep in mind, we could have died!”

Chaos on the subway is a red-blooded topic. It inspires hot emotions, which congeal as they cool into hard, predictable ideology. Leading the argument from the right are the headline writers of the New York Post, who capitalized on this year’s spike in violent subway crime with full-page words like “DOOMED” and “THE FEAR IS RAIL.” Most mornings, these lurid headlines are accompanied by nice pictures of white victims, and mugshots or security video stills of alleged Black perpetrators looking crazy.

From the left, many experts on crime in the subway and elsewhere object to the racist lie embedded in so many front pages of the Post, where the editors prefer to ignore the fact that most crimes in America are committed by white people.

“That’s the dog whistling,” said Ian Haney López, author of the book “Dog Whistle Politics” and a professor of constitutional law at the University of California, Berkeley. “Don’t we know by now that crime is racially coded language intended to divide and distract?”

Perhaps the most wonderful thing about D-Astro and Doc Jr. is the way they dance between ideologies, mocking them, showing all partisans just how confined our systems of belief can be when confronted by the sexy jazzy mastery of art that moves.

“If your man can’t do this?” D-Astro shouts during a Doc Jr. solo on the train. “Leave him!”

Subway dancers embody chaos, because dancing on the subway is against the law.

Subway dancers embody order, because every performance conforms to plan.

Waiting on the platform below Union Square for the next L train to arrive, Doc Jr. makes it plain: “Everything about this is strategy.”

The logic of subway dancing begins with the logic of the subway. Take the L train. That long gap between First Avenue in Manhattan and Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn creates time for up to four dancers, one solo apiece. Tracks in the tunnel were replaced in 2020. They are straight, creating little side-to-side sway for dancers trying to balance on their heads.

Other trains, like the 7 to Queens, place riders in a “conversational” pattern, with some seats jutting into the central corridor. On the L all seats hug the outer walls, leaving the middle clear for tricks. And unlike R and W trains, which travel the spine of Manhattan in their own sweet time, L-train service is predictable.

“You see this? The trains come back-to-back,” said D-Astro, pointing to the next L train speeding into Union Square. “The average L train comes every 3 to 5 minutes. So I can always come down here and handle my business.”

First comes infrastructure. Second comes rider behavior. The L train starts at 8th Avenue, three blocks from the Hudson River. The station’s stairs deposit riders toward the front and middle of the train, not the back. This leaves the rear cars empty, even during rush hour. Subway dancers exploit this vacuum. If it’s Tuesday evening and the cars at Union Square are full, but a dancer’s rent is due on Wednesday, he can ride to the L’s western terminus, claim the center of the rearmost car, and continue making money.

Recently, a dancer named Dashawn Martin performed for Red Bull BC One, a breakdancing competition near Penn Station. After the event, a Red Bull film crew wanted to shoot some dancers in their home environment. So Martin led them to the back of the L, where they performed a few laps in still-quiet cars between 8th Avenue and Broadway.

These decisions are informed by a simple equation: The farther dancers travel from the core of Manhattan, the less money they earn.

“If we’re shooting a video for Instagram, we might take the L to 14th Street, or the Q up to 96th,” said Martin, who dances by the name Moe Black. “We never really go too far.”

Martin joined Doc Jr. and D-Astro for the L-train rotation, but he kept his solos short. He started with the Carlton, the goofy back-and-forth step popularized by Carlton Banks on “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” He did a slow-motion pole spin. He did the splits. He twirled from the overhead bars. He stood on his head and backwards, almost touching his feet to the floor. He did the flag, in which he holds the pole with both arms and stretches his feet out straight.

The same six tricks. Every time. A dancer named D Rillz noticed and called Moe Black out.

“Yo Moe, now you gotta upgrade your moves!” said D Rillz, born with the even more awesome name of Debonair Bolling. “You got that back bend. Now you gotta get a back flip!”

Martin remained polite. He said, “Nah,” and smiled.

What Bolling perhaps didn’t know was that after dancing for the Red Bull event, the film crew, and his friends on the train, Martin would leave for his fourth dance engagement of the day: His job. Martin is a member of Team Hype, a group of dancers that performs during timeouts and halftimes for Brooklyn Nets home games at Barclays Center.

“When you’re dancing all day, you get tired,” Martin said. “If you try to do all your craziest moves, you’ll get injured. You learn to conserve your energy, and still get the job done.”

Finally in the construction of strategy comes the important matter of vibe. D-Astro, Moe Black, Doc Jr., and D Rillz know their reputation. They know they occupy a place of subway status just a half-rung above Mariachi bands. All the dancers have been arrested for dancing on trains, or they know a friend who has. They know their reputation remains tarnished by crews of lesser performers, who danced on trains as a pretext to rob people.

“You don’t see those guys on the trains anymore,” said Deandre Sibblies, who dances by the name Dre Sparkz. “But you can tell some people are still worried about it.”

So the best dancers begin every performance with a statement of intent. First comes their famous call, “Showtime!” and its distended response, “Showtoyme!” Then Doc Jr. recites his lines: “Watch the show, don’t blink! Keep your eyes on the prize. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride. It’s not that bad, I promise. We’re the good guys!”

His patter doesn’t work with everyone. One seated passenger was so upset by a recent show he spent the entire ride from Brooklyn to Manhattan with a finger stuck in each ear as he scowled at the floor. Later, the dancers stood on the platform at Union Square when a passenger threw a cup of orange soda out the open window of a car. The liquid splashed across D-Astro, staining his white-and-red jacket and grey sweatpants.   

“Oh man!” D-Astro said, jumping from the spray. “What the hell was that?”

Most trains contain a few passengers who smile at the free amazing performance offered by the sheer luck of picking the right subway car in New York City. The challenge is to convince those in between, people who are tired, zoned out, but constitutionally disposed toward having a good time.

The best subway dance crews win these uncommitted riders with rapid shifts in tone. This is why Doc Jr. pauses between flips to juggle his sneakers. It’s why he and D-Astro practiced so long to perfect their handoff, which resembles the birth of a tulip.

It’s why Martin, physically the group’s strongest dancer, begins every set by lighting up his face with a huge innocent smile, and dancing the Carlton.

“All the other dancers are coming out so strong with their solos, and then I start with the Carlton? It’s so silly,” he said. “But I sell it! I need people to buy into me doing it, they actually laugh at it. And then I come out with the power of the pole trick. And people are like, ‘Oh! He’s actually good!”

Occasionally these tonal changeups work a little too well. Davishmar Hicks was riding the L to Manhattan when the dancers walked on. As the pole tricks began, he snapped his fingers and smiled. When the dancers exited the train at Union Square, Hicks followed.

When they boarded the next train to Brooklyn, he followed.

When they rode back to Manhattan, Hicks followed again.

“It’s their charisma!” said Hicks, 20. “They know that most people don’t like them, so they use their charisma to get over that.”

Under the bedrock. Under the river. The dancers twist in strange oblique angles to the train, their stage of perpetually forward motion. Who knows where they keep all the dollar bills. This is delicate strategy. It feels polite not to ask. They spend four hours lapping the tunnel. Now D-Astro stands below Union Square. His hands corral a stack of cash too fat to hold. His friends stand in a circle, telling jokes. The Bluetooth speaker is silent. The kings remain to count their spoils. The next train to Brooklyn closes its doors.