Reggie “Regg Roc” Gray invades the Park Avenue Armory with his flex crew

Reggie Gray, or Regg Roc as he is known in the flex world, is a man both cuddly and tenacious, whose warm laugh can veil his determination to make the street dance endure. Like modern dance. Like tap. Like ballet. Flex, recognized by its contortions, pausing, gliding and bone breaking, was born in the early ’90s out of a Jamaican style of street dance called bruk up [Jamaican-style street dance]. In FLEXN, Gray collaborates with director Peter Sellars on a performance piece that shows the development of flex with 21 stellar dancers at the Park Avenue Armory. When Gray, 32, was first approached, he was skeptical. “I’ve been sold so many dreams in my time,” he says with a sigh. But when Alex Poots, the space’s artistic director, asked Gray if he was ready for his life to change, he knew this was different. “He and Peter are visionaries,” says Gray. “They can see far, and it helped me to see further.”

What is your story for FLEXN?
It’s the foundation of what flexing really is: the background, the culture, the feel of it. And not only that, but to show that it can speak instead of just being a bunch of bone breaks and tricks. I wanted to bring back the storytelling in flexing that had started fading a little because of the battles.

What did that do to flexing?
It almost became more commercialized. I want to bring it back and do what we did in the beginning with dancehall and the bruk up—telling stories. We’ll also bring entertainment in.

When did you discover flexing?
I discovered bruk up in ’97 to ’98. My cousin introduced it to me, and at block parties and basement parties in East New York, I saw other people dancing. We started going to this show called Flex N Brooklyn with my dance team HyperActive. We were all junior-high-school friends. When we first went to Flex N Brooklyn, we made a statement.

What happened?
Creatively, we were doing things that people really didn’t do. Don’t get me wrong—there was always a lot of creativity in flexing. Flex N Brooklyn started in the early ’90s. We discovered it in ’99. We just rocked the crowd—everybody was loving it. One dancer had this way of air-walking and gliding that was really different from the hip-hop culture. Another one had this snap from the bruk up but then he added an element of bone breaking to it. Then I started this thing called pausing. It was pretty much created by me looking at a VCR: I was pressing play/pause on the VCR, and I was like, I want to move like that.

How so?
You know the old-school VCRs? If you press play and then pause, it moves a little bit. It was like, Can we do that? The Matrix is a big influence. With Flex N Brooklyn, people started following those styles. After that, there were more styles, because people started being innovators—doing hat tricks and connecting, the get-low style. Around 2004 and 2005, people started saying, “You’re flexing.” The kids started calling it flexing, because they related it to the show Flex N Brooklyn. We didn’t even want that, but when something catches fire, you can’t do anything about it.

How do you show that in FLEXN?
It starts with Deidra [Braz] and myself, meaning the old schools. We start off by showing the dances we did before the dance became flexing. From there, we go into the evolution process. There are generations. We’re probably in the fourth one of dancers that are taking it somewhere different. Brixx [Sean Douglas] is one of the youngest who has learned foundation and is also adding his brilliant style to it. If you don’t keep your foundation, it starts to lose its originality, and then it’s not flexing anymore.

There are so many dancers in this show. Did you hold an audition, or did you know who you wanted?
I really didn’t know what it was going to be in the beginning. Our initial number was 10. And then we were looking at the drill hall [the Armory].

It’s massive.
[Laughs] I was like, Can we get more? We got to the point where we had 20 dancers, and I don’t know how we got there. It was about skill—knowing who could execute the story. We’ve probably been around a good 15 years, and it’s just now getting somewhere where people know what it is and recognize it as a style. The first time it went national was on MTV, America’s Best Dance Crew. Everyone cried.

Why?
We had been underground for so long, and we felt like we’d made so many sacrifices in life—meaning jobs, parents, people, our homes. We could have easily gotten city jobs; there were other influences in the neighborhood—drugs. You could do anything you wanted, but it wasn’t anything that we wanted to be. We wanted to be dancers.

What is the storytelling aspect?
It’s body movement and pure flexing and feeding off one another. No effects. What is your theme? What are you going for? Do you want to be The Matrix? Do you want to be kung fu? It can also be a whole made-up character. I’ve been compared to the Hulk.

What do you hope happens to this dance form?
I want it to live forever. The style can be used and transformed in so many different ways. My friend Jay [Donn] just worked with a bunch of ballet dancers, and that was beautiful. We can merge into anything. It has so many different avenues, with the bone breaking and the pausing, the hat tricks. It’s just eternal for me, and I really want to leave a footprint. It’s not fashion. I promise.

Dance has meant a lot to you. 

Very much. I quit my job around ’06 or ’07 and said, I have to just dance. I was working at the Gap right on 42nd and Broadway, and I kept doing the same thing every day, and I could see my life going nowhere. I could have said, I’m going to get a city job, but I just couldn’t.

What triggered it?
My friends were auditioning for the second season of America’s Best Dance Crew, and I couldn’t go because I was working. They kept threatening me with, “You can’t take off, you’re gonna get fired,” and I’m okay with authority, but when you start taking advantage of it, there’s a problem. I was supposed to get a promotion. It went to someone else. I walked downstairs, and everyone was like, “Reggie, are you the manager now?” I said, “They gave it to someone else,” and they were like, “What?” Today, I just say thank you.