Flexing: The Brooklyn dance craze with a serious message

With its contorted shapes, disjointed movements and explosions of energy, flexing is a dance craze that started on the streets of Brooklyn. It is now being used to protest against racial injustice in a show that pairs performers from New York and Manchester.

When black teenager Trayvon Martin was shot dead by neighbourhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman in Florida in 2012, there was an outcry in America.

In East New York, an area of Brooklyn, Reggie Gray and his friends decided to stage a protest. They did so the way they knew best. They danced.

"That was our form of getting stuff off our chests," says Gray.

"OK, we can't talk about it too much. But we can dance really good. So we got into a park and we went for it."

They made a video titled Dance For Justice, external in which around 20 flexible friends showed off their eye-popping, limb-twisting, bone-breaking moves.

They were flexing - a danceform that grew out of the Jamaican reggae dancehall style 13 or 14 years ago. Gray says it has become something of a phenomenon in Brooklyn, and is now spreading around the world.

Gray, nicknamed Regg Roc, has had no formal dance training. "My dance training really just came from the street," he says.

"It was just me, Michael Jackson and a lot of people on the streets, just dancing and doing their thing. I watched them consecutively to understand how to do certain moves."

He and his friends went on to devise their own moves, like pauzing - a stuttery action that was invented when Gray liked the way pressing pause on a VCR put figures into a repetitive glitchy loop.

With their sharp angles and mechanical movements, they would practise in schools, streets and train stations. "Anywhere we could," Gray says. "There was no limit to it."

The style took off after Gray and his crew became regulars on public access TV show Flex N Brooklyn, which gave the style its name.

The Trayvon Martin case was followed by further unrest over the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, both black men who died during confrontations with the police. In response, flexing began to morph into a form of storytelling and protest.

A show at New York's Park Avenue Armory earlier this year featured around 20 dancers depicting street life and social injustice.

Now, Gray has brought flexing to England for a show at the Manchester International Festival.

He has brought 10 New York dancers with him, and has recruited and trained 10 more from Manchester to perform in FlexN Manchester.

Gray asked each of the dancers to think of a time when their lives changed, and to create a short routine about how it made them feel.

Flexing has also spread to other parts of the globe, reaching as far as Russia and China, Gray says. "It started in Brooklyn, and now it's all over the world."

Estavien says Gray and his group are legends in Brooklyn. "I would see them on a train station and they looked like giants to us," he says.

Estavien was inspired to dance by watching Gray on Flex N Brooklyn and now explains that dancing is his "purpose or mission".

He says: "At this point in my life, I'm questioning everything. But when I dance, I can be sure that I connect to something and I feel like something is speaking through me.

"That's what makes our style so unique - it's the storytelling, the narrative. You don't see any other style with that."

Estavien's routine in the Manchester show is inspired by the tension that followed the deaths of Martin, Brown and Garner, and fits into a sequence in which police give a white prisoner preferential treatment.

"This piece is basically that moment right before you realise, OK I'm going to fight and we're going to get through this," Estavien says. "It's that moment of desperation when you realise the odds you're up against."

Before a call went out for English dancers to take part in the Manchester International Festival show, Bain had seen "little elements" of flexing - but not much.

He has previously worked on stage and on TV, and says: "My world was a very choreographed, controlled world which taught me how to move my body - but it didn't teach me how to say anything."

With flexing, he can express himself. His routine in the show is about how he broke his fibula in a car accident at around the same time his father had a heart operation, and how they supported each other afterwards.

Of the Brooklyn group, he says: "The fact they move to genuinely tell a story and connect to you, I've never seen that before.

"Over here, we have a lot of street dance teams, and it's all about, 'Oh, he did a trick, that's cool'. It's very entertainment. It's very wow factor. But there's no depth to it.

"Whereas being part of this and genuinely saying things that are on your mind and feeling epic because you're being encouraged to push the way you move... I've never seen that."