Movement: The Universal Language
by Deann Armes
Laurie Z Divine Photography
Quentin Robinson is a dancer, yet when he moves it is more than a dance – it is movement art. The muscular fluidity of self-expression communicates to you in a way you’ve never experienced. Your body responds in chills to the energy radiating from the raw beauty and power of his movements. It renders you speechless and motionless to watch this artist – and humanitarian – in motion.
Communication is the core purpose of Quentin’s unique freestyle movement, because for Quentin, dance is “the universal language of expression.” Hip hop dance in particular is breaking barrier and commanding the respect it deserves as an art form; it is a valuable communication tool in bringing human understanding and compassion.
Quentin explains that it doesn’t matter if the audience isn’t familiar with the style of dance. “Authenticity is what we connect to,” he says. The movement is an interpretation of the sounds and words of the music, for the audience. It communicates something we all understand on a deep level even if we don’t have the words for it. “What causes ‘chills’ is a real vibration.”
Quentin, who served in the Marines for a decade, is combining his avidity for service and human connection with dance to start a worldwide effort to generate change through the healing power of movement.
Hip hop, or “street dance,” is a style of dance born of pain, one defined by the expression of experience rather than strict adherence to a discipline.
“It isn’t just rap, it’s a collective experience, everything you go through. You can even do it to opera music, reggae, classical music, anything,” Quentin says. “I do connecting through movement. We use dance and what we’ve gone through in our life to make an impact,” says Quentin.
He and his network of other dancers and artists are busting through every open door “showing instead of asking, saying ‘We are here now.’ This is hip hop. This is popping.”
They aim to place hip hop dance on the same stage as modern art, ballet, and jazz – where it belongs. “You automatically degrade hip hop when you call it ‘street dance,’ but we can take the stage with any other discipline, if not outshine any other discipline. Not to put any other discipline down. It’s just that when you think of hip hop you think of African American. You think of the rough structure of it, and there is rough structure within it. It comes from pain. It comes from trauma. It comes from a lot of things. But the beauty of it is raw and it’s individualized,” he says.
Quentin grew up with ill-fitting shoes and a closet full of hand-me-downs in a Fort Lauderdale, Florida neighborhood where street fights were common. Dancing had to find him. His dance story began as a sixth grader in the late nineties when he popped the VHS tape of the movie Breakin’ into the VCR and discovered he was able to mimic the character Turbo’s “broom dance” scene in minutes.
The very next day, after Breakin’ opened his eyes to the world of dance as self-expression, he came across a different kind of street battle – a dance battle, happening on a neighborhood street he’d walked by dozens of times before.
Street fights were a daily occurrence in this neighborhood, so walking by a circle of kids normally wouldn’t have turned his head, but he saw a headband and white gloves and thought, “Who fights in that attire?”
“They were battling each other. It was literally a street battle, like the movie Breakin’ happening in my neighborhood, that I’d never paid attention to. It’s like this underground thing that, once you figure it out, you start to see it more.” Quentin was pushed into the circle, and by day two he was already performing moves with the best of them – “hitting, popping and gliding right in the same lane as everyone else, but it had the stamp of my personality on it.”
This was Day 2 of movement experience. “This kind of dance was new to me. I’d always done dance like City Boy and Running Man at parties, but that form of dancing was new to me. This was a style, not just a party movement.”
He joined the circle of dancers, forming the groups MAD (Masters at Dance) and All Out, kid with dance names like Tigger, Red, Alert, and Liquid who crowned him with the name Special FX. “We didn’t have mentors or people to come in and do things with us. We learned in the basement, literally. We go to my buddy Thomas Moses’s basement after school until the street lights went out.”
Twenty-two years later, Quentin is using his powerful network of close connections and distinct style of movement to inspire positive change in the world.
The energy of the audience allows you to elevate
Along with giving U.S. students the mentoring he never had as a kid, he recently took his movement-teaching methods to villages in Uganda, started the nonprofit Movements4Movements with the help of Chuad Johnson, Katie Thompson, and Rachel Kersch.
He envisions a worldwide flash mob fundraiser. “Wherever you are in the world, at the same exact time, everyone goes live,” he says. “I want to be able to walk outside and possible hear that song on.”
Quentin says the end goal is to put movement into education, workspaces…everywhere. He wants to build a Movements4Movements network in schools, refugee camps, and camps like Make A Dream and Make a Wish, businesses and nonprofits. “Bringing movement into the daily equation, as a way of life, a way of thinking and a curriculum. The goal is to get everyone in the thought of reverting back to the childhood thing where dancing was a part of your life,” he says. “Dancing should be contagious.”
Leaving a mark on everything he touches, whether it’s speaking or putting movement into a system, is how Quentin defines distinction.
“Someone can mimic the way you move, so to be distinct doesn’t necessarily mean to be separate but to be an entity that moves a room. Everyone can dance but can you move a thought process or an environment? Use movement to MAKE movement? If anger can make everyone else in the room angry, why not dance?”
Bringing movement into the curriculum, he says, allows students to learn from their own experiences: “It digs deep into an understanding of what you actually feel or see or react to. How do you move to express the word compassion? Can you identify compassion with a movement?” And it’s highly individualized. “I don’t want you to show compassion the way someone else shows compassion. Whatever you’re going through, go through it your own way, through your own expression.
Who are you? What do you want to do? And do you have the courage and faith in what you are passionate about?
Quentin explains that when he authentically expresses his individualized translation of sound through movement, it brings understanding and connection from the audience, and the audience’s response further influences his freestyle movement, so it’s a symbiotic energy exchange. “Simultaneously, there’s audience, there’s energy coming from them and sound that’s impacting you, and there’s a bounce of waves going back and forth, the movement through my body with the sound. The emotion in the music immediately starts to course through,” he says. “The energy from the audience allows you to elevate.”
The street dance crew Quentin ran into that day twenty-two years ago are still part of his close circle in business, travel, and entrepreneurship, though they have all focused on different art mediums in production, in film making, in marketing – where Quentin has focused his education. “We all branched out, and we’re hitting those areas where we had a failure in growing up. And when I say failure, I mean the ‘lack of’ in our community,” he says. “When someone says ‘Hey, I want to direct movies based on isms,’ sexism or racism or whatever, we’re using that pain we went through and using movement that got us through it, to throw that into the world in a massive net.”
Quentin is currently working with dancers and creators Jon Boogz and Lil Buck on a project called “Love Heals All Wounds,” a full-length dance show with original score featuring a full cast of movement artists and writer/spoken word artist Robin Sanders. “Boogz is the one who went out and put social justice with directing and is bringing hip hop dance to the same level as modern art, jazz, and ballet,” says Quentin.
“I believe in this work. Everything that we’ve done, and he’s done, has been to elevate the hip hop community. He’s the director. He does that type of thing with the message, where I walk into a school or a business, or a community and change the structure mentally on the level of connecting through movement. We use dance and what we’ve gone through in our life to impact. We target the things that dance got us through, that other people are going through, and use dance to help them get through it. Dance is the tiniest, smallest, most minute title you can give what we do. That’s nothing of what we actually use it for.”
More doors of opportunity have opened for Quentin through another tight network of entrepreneurs, business developers, and “do-gooders” from around the world he met through Hatch. Hatch is a yearly summit, a big “think tank,” that shares gifts and knowledge. “It’s a ‘self-exploration’ summit, not just networking at one event,” he says. The meaningful, personal “family-like level,” of direct contact has helped manifest Quentin’s vision. “Just reach out to say hello, and you’re on a plane to Africa.” That is quite literally the way it happened for him. “I had an idea that was bigger than my bandwidth – to teach a routine around the world.” And he’s closer to it now through this close-knit circle of supportive collaborators. They’ve provided a gateway to spreading his movement, with the visit to Uganda, performing alongside incredible artists, being featured in the music video “Resilient” by Rising Appalachia, doing a TED talk, and other speaking engagements. He credits the Hatch network with giving him the courage to step away from a job to dance and be an artist. The network helped provide answers to: “Who are you, what do you want to do, and do you have the courage and faith to do what you are passionate about?” Running full speed without an agent, the answer is clearly yes, he has the passion. And for three years Quentin has been a professional dancer. “I dance for a living and that is who I am. I am what I do.”
movements4movements.com
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