From urban house parties in the 1970s to the Olympics in the 2020s, hip hop dance has come into its own. Fusion between classical ballet and hip hop even has its own name — hiplet — and hip hop Nutcrackers are now ubiquitous; with even Disney getting in on the act.
Closer to home, partners and soon-to-be-spouses Stuck Sanders and Alee Martinez founded Tribe Crew fusion dance company, which has been treating Bay Area audiences to a Hip Hop Nutcracker since 2017. Tribe will be featured in the two-day Peninsula International Dance Festival at the San Mateo Performing Arts Center, highlighting dance from around the world.
Sanders and Martinez met on a dance crew in 2013 and embody artistic fusion.
“I come from dance battles and street dancing and performing,” said Sacramento native Sanders. “And Alee comes from more technically trained styles. So when we met, it was a great combination of the two. That’s what allowed us to create a company based on street dancing, but also with the structure of a theater company or a classically trained company.”
They formed their company in 2015 to explore dance fusion between hip hop and other dance disciplines. Tribe offers dance classes in San José and San Carlos; fielding several teams, including a youth team, Poise’n Brigade.
Tribe performs throughout the Bay Area, including corporate events, local competitions and “battles” and staged productions like the Nutcracker.
Sanders credits hip hop with putting him on a healthy path.
“It kept me out of trouble,” he said. “It sounds cliched, but coming up in certain neighborhoods, there are a lot of things that you could get into that are not good. I feel like it saved my life. It got me out of a lot of crazy situations, moments where I would walk down the street and be more welcome there, just due to being a dancer.”
Sanders is the youngest of five and tagged along with his older brothers to house parties — hip hop was born at house parties in NYC and California.
“I started dancing in house parties,” he said. “My mom noticed that I was better at dancing than [I was at] a lot of other stuff.”
When he was in the sixth grade, the host of a house party thought Sanders was exceptional and told his mother so.
“She said, ‘You’ve got to put him in classes.’ At that time, I’m like, ‘Classes? What is that?’ So, my mom put me in dance class when I was about 13,” said Sanders.
Before he turned 14, Sanders was performing at Sacramento Kings games, and he’s been performing ever since. In his twenties, Sanders moved to Los Angeles to further develop his art.
A San José native, Martinez also began dancing young.
“My dad put me in a jazz class. That was my introduction to dance,” she explained. “I started going to a church that had a hip hop program.”
This introduction to hip hop intrigued her, and she wanted to understand the form, “dig deeper into the culture of hip hop.”
“I fell in love with the movement,” she said.
As a teenager, she joined dance teams.
“In college, I wanted to learn more about the technical like side of it; where it comes from, ballet, modern jazz,” she said. “I fell in love with that too. I realized that I just love movement.”
Audience participation is an essential quality of hip hop, even when hip hop is conventionally staged, audiences are active and vocal.
“Because hip hop was created in a house party, that’s why the crowd is so interactive,” said Sanders. “[The dancing] usually happens in the middle of the circle. That’s why we like to get our crowd involved because it represents [what] hip hop was in the beginning. It evolved into the dance studios and the music videos, but in the beginning, it was just a raw thing.”
The street violence plaguing the communities where hip hop was born is never far away, either.
“One of my [Nutcracker] soldiers, his mother got shot when he was inside her,” said Sanders.
Another dancer who will perform in the 2024 Nutcracker caught a stray bullet several years ago.
“He had to relearn how to walk,” said Sanders. “But, the next year, he was back in the show. No matter what they go through, [dancers] put themselves out there. We live for that stage.”
The Peninsula International Dance Festival is an opportunity for Tribe to introduce a new audience to hip hop.
“We are a representation of, I think, the best form of hip hop,” said Sanders, “From street to classically trained hip hop. I say ‘classically trained’ because there are hip hop dancers that don’t know street dance. We are doing a set representing different street styles, styles from different neighborhoods and all putting them all together to create a theater experience.”
Peninsula International Dance Festival 2024 is on July 20 at 7:00 p.m. and July 21 at 2:00 p.m. at the at the San Mateo Performing Arts Center. Visit www.peninsulalivelyarts.org/pidf for tickets and information.
Tribe will perform at Hip Hop Halloween on Oct. 28- 29, Hip Hop Nutcracker Sweets on Dec. 2-3, and the full Nutcracker on Dec. 16-17 at Fox Theater in Redwood City. View selections from 2019’s Hip Hop Nutcracker here.
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