Skeeter Rabbit

Stephen Nichols, known professionally as Skeeter Rabbit, was a Los Angeles–based dancer, choreographer, and teacher who became one of the Electric Boogaloos' most versatile innovators. Growing up in Los Angeles, Nichols began as a Locker before transitioning into popping and electric boogaloo around 1978, when he joined his cousins Boogaloo Sam and Popin' Pete in their movement world. He became an official member of the Electric Boogaloos in 1979, at a moment when the group was synthesizing popping—the rhythmic contraction or "hit"—with the rolling, weight-shifting, and illusion-based pathways distinctive to electric boogaloo. Nichols's fluency across locking, popping, and boogaloo made him unusually able to bridge related but distinct West Coast funk-style lineages.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Nichols brought these forms into wider circulation through commercial media. He appeared in the Talking Heads' "Crosseyed and Painless" video, the films *D.C. Cab*, *Body Rock*, and *Fast Forward*, as a featured dancer on David Bowie's Glass Spider tour in 1987, and in Michael Jackson's *Ghosts* around 1997. These credits document the reach of his artistry, though they represent his participation in already-developed Black social and street-dance knowledge rather than its origin.

Nichols became especially valued as an international teacher. French dancers who attended his workshops and tours recalled his ability to break down groove, timing, and vocabulary while grounding everything in dance history. A filmed 1999 interview and solo from Japan shows him speaking about aesthetics and practice. In 2004, he and Popin' Pete released *Old School Dictionary*, an instructional DVD designed to preserve foundational knowledge for new generations.

Nichols died in Los Angeles in May 2006. His legacy rests most clearly in dancer testimony—he is remembered not simply for recognizable steps, but for teaching students how to inhabit the beat, play across it, and transform rhythm into individual expression.