Buddha Stretch: The evolution of hip-hop dance, how Buddhism influences his choreography, and what’s behind his passion

Welcome to Small Talk with Sheila. This is a podcast for anyone chasing joy, craving creativity, and learning to love their messy magical life. Each episode is a bite-sized blend of stories and misadventures. Rom calming your life even when things feel awkward. New episodes drop every week, so hit subscribe and never miss a juicy story. I promise, it'll feel like an unhinged voice note from your most honest and hilarious friend. Listen to Small Talk with Sheila on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. I'm Taliish Langer sitting in for Tom Power. Welcome to Q. This year, hip-hop turned 50 and to celebrate the groundbreaking contributions, the genre, the music, the dancing that hip-hop has added to culture, we here at Q did an entire week devoted to hip-hop. So Tom talked to photographers, to rappers, and dancers about the impact of hip-hop on our culture right now. And one of those pioneering voices belongs to Buddha Stretch. For decades, Stretch has been a key player in hip-hop dance. He even came up with the term himself. He'll talk about the experience of watching an art form just start and develop around you, not in schools, not in a formal setting, but on the streets and at parties and at roller rinks. Stretch started dancing in the early 80s. He was later part of two legendary dance crews, mop top and elite force. And as a dancer and choreographer, he went on to work with everyone. Eric B. Reckheme, Will Smith, to pop acts like Mariah Carey and Michael Jackson. So what happens when hip-hop goes from the tapes you pass around in high school to a global phenomenon? Here's Tom Power's conversation with the award-winning dancer and choreographer, Buddha Stretch. Hi, welcome to the show. Hello, how are you? Thank you for having me. It's a great, great joy to have you. Can you believe a 50 years of hip-hop? Oh, yeah, there are some people that seem to dispute that number, but from the people that I know and the pioneers that I've met, 50 years is an amazing time and it's a great year and time to celebrate the fact that we have 50, that we've had the culture for 50 years. And did you first hear the music? Like when did you first discover hip-hop music? When I was really younger, I didn't know what hip-hop music was. The first music that I heard were from tapes. They were tapes of hip-hop battles with the cold crush brothers. Look up, black guy. Hello, black guy. It's a big, full-down, hot, hollow world. The cold crush ball. It's a fantastic fight and they ain't no talk real evil. Because we are the bad ones. The force MCs who would actually become the force MDs and singers. We are the father of the past MC. MC, the DVD, the GIF by the thunder three. Those were the hip-hop tapes that were passed around. One person had a copy and they would let somebody copy and then you were copies of a copy of a copy. Isn't it amazing going from something that was passed around in school to becoming a worldwide global phenomenon? Yeah, that's the beauty of it. The idea of it wasn't about what it became. It wasn't about consumerism and capitalism. It was about expression. That's the strength of the culture. It's self-expression and I think that's why it's such a global phenomenon. It gives the individual a chance to have a say and audience. I want to talk to you about hip-hop dance. Doing the research that I have, I know you grew up with dancing in the home and you grew up surrounded by dancing. My understanding was a combination of seeing people dance on Soul Train and then your cousin at a party that got you interested in this kind of dance. Am I right about that? Yeah, it was actually a dance called popping. It was on Soul Train. I had been watching Soul Train most of my life as a young kid learning about the music and listening. That was our MTV before there wasn't MTV and I saw this dance on Soul Train. Okay, as you may know, these very creative young men have invented a dancing style that's becoming very popular and it's described as popping or a boogaloo or creeping sand. And they'll do it this time to the bar case. Here we go. But it didn't inspire me to want to do the dance until I saw my cousin's lives doing the dance that I saw on TV and seeing him do it was the inspiration for me because I felt like if he could do it, I could do it. It was more relative to me seeing my cousin do it than seeing someone on television do it. Could you do it well right away? Were you good at it right away? No, I don't think I was good at it right away at all. It took time and practice. So at this point, it's good to mention to people who are listening to this that when we talk about dance within hip hop, with the way I say it, it sounds like it's a model of life. It's a really nuanced term. There are a lot of different forms within it. And I've heard you talk a little bit about that this is a good piece of music to understand the nuance of hip hop dance. Just take a listen to this. So, stretch, can you tell us what we're listening to right now and why it's a good song to help understand hip hop dance? A funk song and that we played that we heard constantly at Rolling Ring. And the reason why it's a great song is because it's describing the techniques used in hip hop dance. That's one of the songs that I use to teach about hip hop technique, what people call groups. That song is basically singing about movement and there's actually a line dance that goes with that song. And we use that myself in one of my crewmates, Link. We use that and teach that line dance to teach people the techniques behind the dance. I should mention and maybe we should just clear the stuff for people who are listening to this. When we talk about hip hop dance, we're talking about something different than popping. We were talking about earlier and we're talking about something different than like breaking which I think people might be familiar with. Yes. What it is is hip hop dance is an amalgamation of those dances. It takes the technique from popping and stylization from breaking top rock and floor rock and combines them but also combines them with whatever the latest popular social dances at the moment. And you're doing this combination of these three things spontaneously and that's the freestyle element. It's not preset moves. You're trying to express yourself using these movements in tandem. You have the sort of like formative dancing of that time, breaking and popping and then you have sort of contemporary styles that are coming in, anything that's kind of happening in pop culture and it's all kind of folded in in the moment is what you're saying. Yes, because the moment is in the music. When you hear a particular piece of music, it's going to inspire a particular way of movement and the beauty of the dances, it connects directly to the music. There are different cadences and rhythms in hip hop. You know, there are different kinds of hip hop. You have classic hip hop which was more in tune with live musicianship. Then you had the electronic age with planet rock and others and then you had the boom bat and then you have trap and now you have drill. So all of those different styles of hip hop music have different movements that accompany it. So when you were starting out at the beginning days of hip hop dance, what was the scene like? The thing about it early on in hip hop is you had basically it was breaking and then each B-boy B-girl crew would have one or two poppers as a part of the crew and you learned how to do a little bit of everything. That's the difference I think in terms of the culture. Everyone learned different aspects of the dance and then you had particular people who were good and did specialized movements in the dance. But you learned everything like as a dancer when I was in my first crew, I learned how to break, I learned how to pop, I learned graffiti. I learned how to DJ, I learned how to MC. You did the culture, you didn't do one thing. You did all of hip hop in one thing. You did all of hip hop in yourself. Not just you were just a rapper, not just you were a dancer. Yeah, you did everything and then you got good at something in particular and you focused on that but you could still do everything. But it's the same in the dance. If you were good at footwork, you were good at footwork but you had to have something else, you still practiced specific movements. You had to learn how to do a backspin. You had to learn how to do head spins. You had to learn how to float, how to glide, how to wave. You learned everything. That didn't mean you were good at everything but you learned everything. But I feel like in those days you weren't just good at it and I'm going to be a bit of a nerd here for a second. You weren't just good at it. You were also interested in developing it as a form of a vernacular dance. You were interested in the development of hip hop dances of form. Well that's the thing. It developed naturally because, as I said, once you get into it and you get good at something, you're going to investigate where that's coming from and where you can take it and that investigation is going to lead you to the connections of the dance. That's the beauty of the dance. It's growing. It's an outgrowth of the music and it happens naturally once you've invested into it. In that case, it must have been so exciting to watch that dance develop within a community. Well yeah, that's the beauty of it. It's exciting because you're dancing with people. It's not in your house dancing in the mirror trying to come up with something. This is social connection with the music and the people that you're around. The dance is built through interaction. If I'm doing one step, someone's dancing with me. They're putting their spin on what I'm doing and I pick up on what they're doing and then I put my spin back on it and then someone else will join in on the conversation. Now we have different variations of the same thing which builds up the repertoire of what we're doing. We no longer have one step. We have five or six steps and then we flip that into another step and now we're building the dance as we're going. That's the beauty of it because the interaction of dancing with someone and creating in the moment, the spontaneity of it. It's so exciting even just to hear you talking about it. Where were the, like, pay me a picture of where this was kind of happening. What kind of parties were you going to, what kind of events were you going to? It all sounds so exciting. Where were you dancing in those early days? Well, early on we were too young to get into clubs. We were getting fake IDs to try to get into clubs. A lot of the times, the first clubs that we went to were roller rinks. The youth because hip-hop was a youth culture, you went to the roller rinks and then at particular time the end of the roller rink at the end of the night, they would stop, you know, the skating part and the last hour or two hours of the roller rink would just be party and people would dance. You take off your skates and dance. There's a party in that rock set. We'll be rockin' tonight. So bring your party with you baby. Guys, I'll make you feel right. It's a pretty shallow. That's one of the first places that things would happen outside of when you had park jams or block parties. Now, park jams when someone sets up in a park and they set up the music and the people just come and party together and then you have block parties where each block is cut off and the neighbors come out and exchange food and information and that's how you met the people in your neighborhood and then over time music and dance were introduced to the block parties. So you would travel in the summertime from block to block. Each block would have their own block party and different music and people and you would meet the people in your neighborhood and you would see the dance, you know, grow in that way. Hey girls, beat boys. Superstar DJs. Here we go. It's, again, it's just exciting to hear about it. One thing I'm curious about is, I mean, I've been calling you stretch here, you know, you're to reintroduce your name is Buddhist stretch and your father introduced you to Buddhism at the same time as you were discovering this scene and discovering, dancing and discovering and discovering hip-hop. Was there overlap there? Like did having Buddhism be introduced into your life? But either that spirituality or that practice or that anchor, did that give anything to your dancing at the time? I gave it focus. I mentioned my dad all the time is because his introducing me to Buddhism and chanting for meditation is what gave my dance and all the aspects of my applications in hip-hop culture a unique focus. Now I was able to focus in on what I'm doing also to look at it from, I approached the culture from a Buddhist standpoint. I always approached the culture from a standpoint of balance. You know, a standpoint of balance? Yeah, because in Buddhism, one of the aspects of Buddhism is the middle way is to find balance. You're not going to extremes. You know, extremes take you off balance, but if you stay in the middle, you can move, you know, side to side, front to back and remain calm. You can remain in a space of calmness and reason. And I think in hip-hop culture that allowed me to focus my energies in ways that wouldn't take me into extremes where I would be able to, because growing up, I had a really bad temper. And that helped me, I inherited that temper from both of my parents. My dad had a very bad temper and my mother did too. And my dad's introduction of Buddhism helped me calm that and helped me see things from a standpoint of always looking at it from a reasonable standpoint. Always coming at things from a calm standpoint where I could reason and I could approach things from, you know, not from just an emotional standpoint, but from a calm and a meditative standpoint where I could, there would be a better understanding of what I'm doing. And that approach had, you know, immediately paid dividends in my dance life, in my music life, in the entire culture. It changed everything about how I saw the culture. I mean, your name too, I'm guessing. Well, yeah, that came out of, after a couple of years, I'd say it was almost a decade of studying Buddhism and traveling and meeting other people who were Buddhist and also Hindu and learning different things. Every time I came home from traveling, I would tell my father about what I met and what I learned. And he started to call me Master Stretch. And at the time I was in my 20s and I was very uncomfortable with being called the Master of Anything. And so one of my best friends and my crewmate, Caliphus, who came up with that designation and said, "I see that you're uncomfortable with Master Stretch." You know, what pops call a new Master Stretch. So I'm going to call you Uda Stretch. And it stuck. It was transformative at that time because it made me understand like, "Okay, now this is this designation that I have to live up to." You know, so I approached everything from that standpoint of, "How would Shaka Muni go about this?" You know, "How would my tray go about this? How would they look at this? How could I apply their philosophy and their perspective to what I'm doing so that I do it to the best of my ability?" And from a standpoint of, "It doesn't just benefit me. It benefits everyone that come in contact." I love hearing about the middle way or like, "Equanimity," whatever you want to call it. How it impacted both your art and your personal life and your family. It's a really kind of compelling story. I have more music I want to play for you. I want you to take a listen to this. Okay. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ So Buda Stretch, can you tell me what that is and why we're playing it for you? That's Eric V. and Raqim. Eric V. for President, 1986. That's right. Why are we playing that for you, you think? That's the. Well, that was one of the biggest songs of 1986, but it's also the first music video that I had ever done that was never released. And the first time I got to work with. Well, the second time that I got to work with an artist, you know, as a dancer in choreographer. It must have been so exciting, hey, I mean, you were were telling me a little bit about dancing in clubs and in roller rinks and like at block parties and stuff like that. But it must have been exciting when you were able to like capture it on video. Well, yeah, it was that that was the thing. Prior to that point, I had never done, I'd done a music video before that with local R&B act years before. But we never got to see what we were doing and that video was never released. When we shot every beat for president, we shot it at Long Island University in Brooklyn. And the thing about it is as they were shooting, we would get to see what they shot. So there was the first time seeing myself dance. Wow, really? Yeah. And then the following year, I went on tour with Houdini and one of the people that work with Eric B is a friend of mine, his name is Sonny. He actually showed me the video when we were on tour and that was the first time I got to see us dance together on screen and to see what we were doing because prior to that, there were no video cameras. We didn't get to see what we looked like. That's mine. Yeah, obviously that's mind blowing to me. I'm just thinking about like now, I have a thing in my pocket right now, stranger. Exactly. And I could use to it. Like I know exactly how to record everything all the time. The idea that you were dancing, not just dancing, but like dancing for years, developing a style and being part of a community that developed a style. And you didn't really know what you looked like doing it. That's why. Yeah, we only got, we only knew what it felt like and the response from the audience when we danced or seeing someone else doing what you're doing is nice, but it's not seeing yourself doing it. So to be able to look at a clip of yourself dancing and you actually see what you're doing and you see like it actually looks how it feels. Sometimes it looks better than how it feels. So it was mind boggling when we first started doing music videos to see what we were doing and it was like, wow, okay. [Music] From 1986, you're listening to Eric B and Rock him. Eric B is president, one of the first videos, Buddha Stretch, the award-winning dancer and choreographer ever danced in. Before that, you heard the first part of Tom's conversation with Stretch. Coming up, you're going to hear what it was like when Stretch taught one of his heroes how to hip-hop dance and try to convince that hero who was a mega mega mega mega super star to go to a club in disguise. That's coming up here on cue. [Music] The news doesn't wait. So why should you? I'm Berjesh Dev host of Big Headlines, your new Daily News headline podcast built for busy Canadians. From the team behind the big story, every weekday at 11 a.m. Eastern, we'll break down the biggest stories in Canada and around the world. Quickly, clearly, just your snapshot into the headlines that matter to Canadians in easy to digest bites. Perfect for your commute, your lunch break or that five minute reset between meetings. Listen to big headlines now on your favorite podcast player. [Music] You're not going to understand the movement if you don't understand the music and the music is tied directly to the culture. So there are nuances to specific movement that you're not going to understand if you don't understand where those nuances come from. That's Buddhist Stretch who embodies those nuances quite literally physically as a dancer. I'm Taliish Linger sitting in for Tom Power and you're in the middle of Tom's conversation with Buddha Stretch, a word-winning dancer, choreographer and pioneer of hip-hop dance. Stretch has had a long career. He earned his stripes in the 80s, performing in roller rinks and clubs, and then went on to be the first call choreographer for artists like Mariah Carey and Will Smith. The back in 1992 stretch had one of his most memorable moments teaching hip-hop dance to his dance hero. Here's the rest of Tom Power's conversation with Buddha Stretch. [Music] MJ. MJ is right. Michael Jackson remember the time 92 I think, right? 92, yeah. You taught Michael Jackson hip-hop dance? Yes, shout out to Fatima Robinson. We taught Michael Jackson hip-hop dance. Tell me about that. It was, you know, after the birth of my daughters is the greatest experience in my life, basically, to be in a room with the King of Pop, someone that I grew up watching, watching perform, dancing on television, you know, and to be in a room and to be teaching him, first of all, for him to be asking questions about this dance that my father used to kick me out of the house for, was just, you know, amazing to me because I'm like, wow, Michael Jackson's interested in what I'm doing. And not only is he interested in asking all these questions, and he literally wants to learn as much as he can in the moment. And he was such a student and a stooped professional of what he does that it was inspiring to watch because he's at the top of the food chain yet he's working like he's still at the bottom of the food chain. Was he good right away? He was great because he didn't learn, like normally when you're teaching someone choreography, you teach them or a step, you're teaching them by count. Michael Jackson did learn by count. You'd had to put the step in rhythm and you had to explain it in rhythm. And once you explained it in rhythm, he could catch it really fast. Did you have any opportunity to ask him any questions? Did you ask him, like, hey, can you show me moonwalking or anything like that? Well, no. One of the things that we were asking him that was in the conversation was, you know, had he ever, because he was asking us about the dance. And we were explaining like how, you know, how we dance in the club together and how, you know, he didn't know what that felt like or, you know, about, he had seen battles, you know, he knew about battles, but he had never seen one. So we were trying to get him to come to a club, you know, in disguise. And, you know, we tried to get him to put on some baggy jeans and a hoodie and a, you know, baseball cap and some Timberlands or sneakers and just come to the club with his face concealed and no one would know and he could actually see, you know, and experience what that was like. Yeah. And we almost got him there, but just before his security and management talked him out of it. Oh, no. I was really hoping that story ended with you sneaking in. Yeah. No, they talked him out of it because they didn't believe that we wouldn't let people know that he was it. And the thing about it was we were trying to explain like, you don't have to let us know that you're there. Just show up. No one's going to believe that Michael Jackson's a hoodie and a baseball cap with baggy pants on in the club. No one would recognize him, you know, he could put a scarf over his face or whatever. No one would believe that that's Mike and he didn't have to, you know, let anyone know, but they took it like we would let people know and then paparazzi would show up and it would be a nightmare and they didn't get it. So they talked him out of it and we he never got to come. It makes me kind of sad, you know, knowing like how influential he was in his in his dancing was. Like on the topic of teaching, I wanted to talk about that a little bit because my understanding is and I was hoping you might be able to talk a bit about this when you go into a choreography situation where you're teaching someone how to dance or you're working in choreography with with dancers. My understanding is that you don't just teach the dance. It's important to you that you teach about hip-hop broadly as a culture, is that right? Well, yeah, you're not going to understand the movement if you don't understand the music and the music is tied directly to the culture. So there are, you know, nuances to specific movement that you're not going to understand if you don't understand where that those nuances come from. It's going to feel like puppetry if you don't know it. So when I teach the dance, I teach the culture behind the dance, I teach the understanding of how the dance connects with the music. If you understand the music, then it's much easier to understand the dance and the culture. But if you don't, then it's, you know, you get people that they're moving, it feels weird to them and that's because they don't have an understanding. Once you have an understanding, it feels completely different. Before we go, I'm going to close off by asking you the question that I've asked. Everybody who has come on the show for Hip Hop Week. And I'll let you right now, Striaches. It's not an easy question, but it's been interesting to see what kind of different answers we've been getting from it. It's been 50 years of Hip Hop. What has Hip Hop given you? What has Hip Hop given me? Oh, wow. A voice, a means of nonverbal communication. I've been to 69 countries. I don't speak 69 languages. But in each of those places, I was able to have a conversation with the people there and come to an understanding through music and culture. That's what Hip Hop has given. That's a beautiful, beautiful answer. Stretchman, what a joy to get to talk to you and hear a little bit about your expertise and a little bit about your history and your ideas around this culture. Thank you so much for making the time. This was a really fun app. Most of the interviews that I do are on video. So to do one on radio is so much more fun because the interaction is different because I can't see you. And the energy is different and different energy is what's needed. You learned from that. I like it because I don't have to get a haircut. Yeah, it's funny because I don't know that we're doing this way. So I'm trying to get my wife's braiding my hair and make sure that. And then it's like, I don't need to do it either. It's like, oh, this is even better. I don't have to get my look on for anything. I could just speak and be, you know, it's much more comfortable. Well, we're really appreciative of you being here. Thanks so much. Thank you. That's it for this episode of The Podcast. But there's another episode in your feed right now. It is Tom's conversation with illispee who has made one of the coolest musical projects I've heard in some time. She's taken a bunch of popular songs you've heard before, like Heart of Glass by Blondie, Time After Time by Cindy Lopper, and translated them into Inocutote. And in doing that, she's found these deep meanings and layers to the songs that you might not have thought of, even though we're super familiar with them in pop culture. The music is gorgeous. And the conversation is really interesting. You can find that in your feed. Or right now, I'm Tally O'Schlanger, sitting in for Tom Power. And I'll see you next time.