It was Friday night and 30 young men were crammed inside a tiny storefront in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. The wiry ringleader, Albert Esquilin, a 27-yearold graphic designer, cleared out a small oval and started to flail like a zombie.
As the beats of the Caribbean superstar Bounty Killer scratched their way out of badly blown speakers, Mr. Esquilin contorted himself in a series of pantomime-like moves that evoked break dancing, raving and butoh in equal parts. He ended with limbs splayed on the floor, as the throng growled his nickname, Ghost, in approval.
This was a warm-up for the Bed Stuy Veterans, one of dozens of dance groups that are reviving an Afro-Caribbean dance called brukup .
Started in Jamaica in the early ‘90s by a street dancer with a broken leg, brukup flourished in Brooklyn’s space-deprived housing projects and had a flirtation with pop culture in 1997, when Busta Rhymes featured it in the video for “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See.” Instead of fading into obscurity like so many other urban dance crazes, YouTube videos have helped keep it popular and given dancers like Mr. Esquilin fans as far away as Sydney and Shanghai, uploading videos on YouTube and generating millions of views.
Mr. Esquilin started the Bed Stuy Veterans with his childhood friends Shawn Theagene (also known as Poba) and Justin Quinones (Rain) as a way of spreading their own strain of brukup dancing, which incorporates pop culture references like the action movies “Lost Boys” and “Innocent Blood.”
One video begins with Japanese dialogue from the anime series “Naruto Shippuden” and the faux translation, “Sensei Ghost is calling out to us,” followed by a montage of young dancers. One dancer, Dravon Washington, who goes by Dominus the Konqueror: The Most Electrifying Man in Brooklyn, performs with fangs and a cape, like the one Wesley Snipes wears in the vampire action movie “Blade.” His disciple, Kervin Garson (Dice the Ninja), uses a plastic samurai sword in his routines.
But the subcultural art form isn’t just virtual. Mr. Esquilin, who can be fierce on the dance floor but is generous with hugs, started the League of Unreal Dancing, or LOUD, which sponsors dance battles four times a year and draws more than 300 spectators. It’s competition and community without gangs and violence, he said.
“Dancing saved my life plenty of times,” Mr. Theagene said. “I had friends who were shot dead hanging out on the corner. I would have been there, too, if I wasn’t out dancing somewhere.”
By CATHAY CHE
