The Poppin' and Lockin' Ain't Stoppin'

Breakin'

It boggles the mind, but the facts, if not the songs, remain the same. There are those among us unaware of the cultural significance, nay, the very retro-zeitgeistian American pop-culture pillar that is the one, the only, Boogaloo Shrimp (né Michael Chambers): The man who was once a young man who, in 1984, transformed urban dancing – and, by extension, every single hip-hop video, multifaceted Madonna move, and the very notion of what the human body was kinetically, freakishly capable of – via a technique known as poppin' and lockin', whereby the until-then rigid idea of the fluid physicality of dance was deconstructed into a stuttery, robotic series of near-spastic motions bringing to mind nothing so much as one of Blade Runner's nonhuman replicants run gorgeously amok, replete with tears in the rain and attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.

Director Joel Silberg's 1984 film Breakin', co-produced with David Zito, is unfairly forgotten for the most part by mainstream America (not to mention its sequel, Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo), but Zito and Shrimp (the nickname stems from his father's gig as a California longshoreman and the fact that he was the youngest of three emphatically unshrimpified siblings) are back in action, soon to helm the final part of the Breakin' trilogy: The Booglaoo Kid – think The Karate Kid with the 39-year-old Shrimp in the Mr. Miyagi role – and poised, in a world that has for some 25 years attributed the moon walk not to Neil Armstrong but to Michael Jackson, for future greatness.

The Chronicle spoke to the savvy, gracious Shrimp and his one-man cheering squad Zito a week before their appearance at the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown this Saturday evening, where both Breakin' films will be screened and the old school will – finally and with long overdue respect – be reborn, phoenixlike, before your very eyes. Don't even think of blinking.

Austin Chronicle: For people who aren't familiar with Breakin' or your style of dance, how would you describe what you do? And how did you develop it?

Boogaloo Shrimp: It's a form of "popping," which composes mime with robotic movements. I call it "liquid animation." As for how that got started, I grew up in a time when the "Robot" was really popular and you had a lot of science-fiction films like Clash of the Titans – all those legendary Ray Harryhausen, stop-motion monster movies –

AC: Whoa. Ray was just here in Austin a few nights ago screening the 1933 King Kong!

BS: You're kidding! Wow. So then you know exactly what I'm talking about! Because of my passion for his revolutionary stop-motion technique, I immediately thought that if I could imitate these claymation characters, I could take my movements a step further and not look human but look like something from out of this world.

AC: Real life moves at 24-frames-per-second, but you re-edited your reality to appear to exist in a slightly less fluid dimension, essentially.

BS: That's it! Absolutely! My schtick was imitating Harryhausen's characters, and then trying to perfect the moonwalk.

AC: Who invented that particular move?

BS: Well, it was a bit like when Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb, right, but there were many other people having parallel revelations at the same time. Jeffrey Daniels from Shalimar was the first to bring it to national attention. And then the club kids and others picked that up and made it their own. I began to take it to a different level, using a very long stride as opposed to the moonwalk that Michael Jackson used. That came from trying to imitate the look of being on one of the moving sidewalk trams at the airport, you know?

AC: You put a lot thought into this at a very young age.

BS: Oh, yeah, you had to, so that when you were hanging out on the Sunset Strip and battling somebody you could defend your name and your street cred. It was a science. I set out to try and be one of the best in a sea of dancers from Soul Train and Solid Gold. I came from Willmington, Calif., right outside of Los Angeles, and every weekend I would have to battle my way up from there. It was almost like that movie The Warriors, with me battling my way uptown to Coney Island with the Baseball Furies on my back. That's why I love [Walter Hill's 1979 surrealist NYC gang epic], because if you put it into a dance context, that exactly what we were doing in Los Angeles in the early Eighties, battling via dance to get respect and to get your name out there. But you know what's really cool is that dance is finally coming back with a vengeance.

AC: And you're poised to be the elder statesman of a whole new resurgence.

BS: I'm just really happy that people are finally starting to recognize my contribution to hip-hop. Over the years I've seen people like Usher and Ginuwine doing the moves that I invented! I'm not tooting my own horn here, but it's nice to still be appreciated and to be able to pass that particular torch along to a whole new school of dancers.

Admission: www.originalalamo.com