Boogaloo

Rolls (hip/knee/head), angles, fluid transitions, and illusion integrated with popping.

Solo; battle.

Featured in popping battles and crew routines.

Bay Area roots; worldwide practice.

'Boogaloo' the funk style is distinct from the 1960s Latin boogaloo music genre of the same name.

Boogaloo is a freestyle funk dance of Oakland, California, built on continuous rolling motion through the hips, knees, neck and head, on angles held and broken rather than steps counted, and on illusion: the dancer appears to move in a way a body should not. It is danced solo, most often in competition against another dancer.

Origins and the disagreement about them. The sources we hold do not tell one story, and this page states both. Wikipedia's article on the funk dance, drawing on Robert Pruter's Chicago Soul (1992, p. 204), describes an earlier and separate thing: a social dance in the African American community in Chicago, current between 1965 and 1966, in which "the entire body moved in a pulsating motion from side to side", carried by records including Tom and Jerrio's "Boo-Ga-Loo" and James Brown's "James Brown's Boogaloo" (1966). The same article dates the Oakland work that this page is about to the middle 1960s: John Murphy imitating the robot from the 1954 film Tobor the Great in 1964 and carrying the Robot into East Oakland school talent shows, and Larry Thompson creating an Oakland boogaloo style in 1966 out of the social dance, James Brown, the Temptations and Fred Astaire. Against that, the KQED account of the If Cities Could Dance episode on Oakland boogaloo (Eric Arnold and Spencer Wilkinson, January 15, 2021) presents it as a "1970s art form" and as "a dance form invented by African American youth in Oakland", giving no year for the origin and no basis for the Oakland claim. Both readings are on the record; this page does not choose between them.

What is firmly dated is the crew era. Will Randolph and classmates at Elmhurst Junior High in East Oakland named themselves the Black Resurgents in 1971, inspired, in the KQED account, by the Black Panthers and the social justice movements of the post-civil-rights years; their chief rivals were the Black Messengers, also of East Oakland, formed in 1972 and televised as "Mechanical Device". S.S. Enterprise and Derrick and Company came out of West Oakland. The dancing lived at Castlemont and McClymonds high schools, at Arroyo Park and Mosswood Park, and at the Oakland Auditorium. Television followed: the Black Resurgents on KEMO's Jay Payton Show in 1976, Granny and the Robotroids on The Gong Show the same year, the Black Messengers winning it as Mechanical Device in 1977 and again in 1978.

Related styles, and which way the lineage runs. Oakland boogaloo is the parent of two neighboring city styles rather than a branch of either: San Francisco strutting, which Wikipedia dates to a 1975 San Francisco talent show by the Oakland Robotroids, and Richmond robottin'. Together they are what the wider dance world calls the funk styles. Popping, the Fresno style boogaloo is most often confused with, came afterwards and out of boogaloo: popping "would be eventually adapted from earlier Boogaloo movements to influence dancers in Fresno, California, in the late 1970s", by way of the West Coast Relays, and the technique it grew from, "Posing Hard", is credited to Black Messengers dancers in the early 1970s. KQED records a second claim of descent, that boogaloo's "movement vocabulary was adopted-some say appropriated-into the Southern California dance known as locking, eventually widely recognized as pop-locking".

Misconceptions. Three are worth naming. Boogaloo the Oakland funk dance is not the 1960s Latin boogaloo music genre, which shares only the word. It is not the 1960s Chicago social dance described above, which the Oakland dancers themselves distinguished: Jerry Rentie, "When we were Bug'n, we meant Boogaloo in the term of our dance style, but it was not the James Brown Boogaloo anymore." And it is not electric boogaloo, the later Fresno style, nor a sub-genre of popping; treating "electric boogaloo" as simply another name for this dance is the erasure the Oakland originators in the KQED piece are arguing against.

The dance today. It declined in the middle 1980s as hip-hop and breaking took the national stage, and it is maintained deliberately: Randolph founded the BRS Alliance in 2000 with Ralph "Plik Plok" Montejo of Richmond and Lonnie "Pop Tart" Green of San Francisco, and an Original Boogaloo Reunion Barbeque has been held at Oakland's Middle Harbor Shoreline Park since 2011. Turf dancing came out of the same Oakland streets in the late 1990s and early 2000s; in Randolph's words, "Turfing in the millennium is what boogaloo was in the '70s."

Music, stated as a gap. We hold no tempo band, time signature or example tracks for this dance from any source, and this page prints none rather than estimating one. Wikipedia names records the dance is done to -- James Brown's "Cold Sweat" and "There Was a Time", the Average White Band's "Pick up the Pieces", Parliament-Funkadelic's "Flashlight", Cameo's "Rigor Mortis" -- and says boogaloo "relies on the swing and groove of live funk records", but gives no tempo figure. The 4/4 figure in the same article belongs to the Chicago social dance, not to this one.