Tyrone Proctor

Tyrone Proctor, widely known as Tyrone "The Bone" Proctor, was a pioneering waacking dancer, choreographer, teacher, and historian who carried the form from early-1970s Black and Latino gay clubs in Los Angeles onto national television and a worldwide teaching circuit. Growing up in Philadelphia's West Oak Lane, Proctor was not an instant dancer. He practiced steadily at Wagner's Ballroom through his teenage years, and by the time he graduated from Olney High School in 1972, he had choreographed the drama department's *Hello, Dolly!*, organized an African dance group, and been voted best dancer. That same year, at 17, he moved to Los Angeles determined to join *Soul Train*. He famously hid in a friend's car trunk to reach the studio lot, where his expansive performance style caught the attention of host-producer Don Cornelius, who gave him the nickname "The Bone" for his slender build and selected him for a national *Soul Train* tour in 1973.

Waacking—also called punking within its early community—emerged through Black and Latino gay club culture, notably at venues including the Paradise Ballroom and the Gas Station in Los Angeles. The form's vocabulary centers on fast arm rotations and strikes, posing, character work, and old-Hollywood glamour, offering performers space for exuberance and emotional projection. Proctor did not create waacking alone; he worked alongside and credited many peers and predecessors who shared this collective vocabulary. On *Soul Train*, however, his visibility became exceptional. Performing in the Outrageous Waack Dancers alongside Jeffrey Daniel, Jody Watley, Sharon Hill-Wood, and others, he helped translate club knowledge into a national cultural reference.

In 1975, Proctor and partner Sharon Hill won an *American Bandstand* dance competition. By the early 1980s he had relocated to New York, where he performed with Breed of Motion in a circle that included Archie Burnett and Willi Ninja. His commercial choreography expanded across projects for Jody Watley, Johnny Kemp, the Isley Brothers, Taylor Dayne, Keith Sweat, LeVert, and New Kids on the Block. His work was connected to a choreography nomination at the 1989 MTV Video Music Awards.

From the 1990s onward, Proctor became a traveling teacher and mentor, instructing dancers across the United States and in Japan, Brazil, China, Europe, and beyond. In these settings, he taught not only arm patterns and poses but the lived histories that produced them. Family and peers emphasize that he consistently framed waacking as gay cultural history shaped by both exuberance and the necessity for safety and community. He later became father of the international Imperial House of Waacking, structuring a network through which younger dancers could learn, battle, and teach. Proctor remained active as a choreographer and teacher until pandemic shutdowns halted in-person work in 2020. He died in New York that June at age 66. His achievement lay not in singular invention but in bridging multiple worlds—clubs, television, touring, commercial video, studios, houses, and international workshops—while continuously crediting the queer dancers who formed waacking in 1970s Los Angeles.