Reggie Regg Roc Gray

Reggie Gray, known professionally as Regg Roc, is a Brooklyn-based flexn dancer, choreographer, artistic director, and educator who helped move the Jamaican-rooted street vocabulary of flexing into theatrical, educational, and social-justice contexts while keeping it rooted in its local lineage. Gray grew up in East New York, Brooklyn, in a Caribbean cultural environment where reggae and dancehall circulated through family and neighborhood life. In the late 1990s, he entered the emerging Brooklyn scene that would become known as flexing or flexn, dancing with Hyperactive, one of the crews connected to the public-access television program *Flex N Brooklyn*. That scene drew on Jamaican brukup and dancehall practices while developing a Brooklyn vocabulary that included pausing, gliding, connecting, animation, get-low, and the extreme joint articulations called bone-breaking—a collective language shaped by many dancers rather than any single inventor.

Gray later formed Main Eventt and became associated with the RingMasters crew, which reached national television on *America's Best Dance Crew* in 2009. With Kareem Baptiste, he helped establish BattleFest, a platform where dancers could test ideas, develop personas, and build the form through competition and exchange. These community structures proved as vital as stage visibility: they created spaces where local knowledge could be transmitted and new movement approaches recognized. In 2011, Gray founded the D.R.E.A.M. Ring, extending his work into mentorship and community organizing. His collaboration with director Peter Sellars led to *FLEXN* at Park Avenue Armory in 2015, Gray's first major evening-length choreographic project. The production framed self-choreographed and improvised solos by flexn artists within a theatrical work concerned with policing, incarceration, and racial justice, while crediting the dancers as creative agents.

The 2017 *FLEXN Evolution* returned to the Armory with sixteen dancers and a broadened design and music team, including Sellars, Ben Zamora, Angela Wendt, and Epic B. Gray has continued as artistic director of FlexNYC and in touring, teaching, and collaborative projects. A 2019 Guardian profile documented his use of flexn as a vehicle for young performers' testimony and identity, underscoring that his practice combines movement innovation with social organization.