The stage at the Portage Theater doesn’t usually serve any purpose aside from putting a gap of maybe 20 feet between the first row of seats and the screen. But on the afternoon of Sunday, March 21, it was hotly contested territory.
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The style is called footwork. At heart it’s a Chicago phenomenon, but a dancer who goes by Bobo—here with the west-side crew Nemesis—tells me it’s starting to spread, mostly to larger cities in the midwest. It was born in the early 90s, around the time of Cajmere’s “Percolator,” and it’s grown alongside juke music, a hip-hop-influenced descendent of house that’s been a staple of south- and west-side clubs for more than 15 years. Like breakdancing, footworking is at its best not in clubs but in the wild. A few venues host footwork events—the Battlegrounds at 87th and East End has one every Sunday night—but the majority of the vast number of footwork videos on YouTube are set in places like high school hallways, outdoor public basketball courts, and bedrooms. Also like breakdancing, footworking thrives on competition and one-upsmanship, whether it’s two rival crews onstage at the Portage or the every-man-for-himself free-for-all of a playground cipher.
The Portage event was organized by a 38-year-old event promoter, talent scout, and footwork fanatic named Wala Williams, who maintains a busy YouTube channel of related videos under the name Wala Cam. In part it was an annual awards ceremony for dance crews and DJs, but those decisions had all been made before anybody took the stage—the best crew, named early in the day, were west siders 187 Murder on the Dancefloor; DJ Gant-Man and DJ Puncho, both pillars of the juke scene, were honored as well, and the troupe Full Effect (part of the Full Effect Dance Theatre) was recognized for giving footwork a national boost by appearing in Missy Elliott’s 2005 video for “Lose Control.” The real excitement was the dancing: though it was supposedly a contest, there weren’t any judges or any formal announcements of winners. The outcomes were determined by the crowd, which was pretty good at telling who’d just gotten faced.
At the Portage, no matter how heated the onstage battles got, nobody ever really seemed mad about anything—except when the DJ put on a song they didn’t like and they’d stop what they were doing to wave him on to the next track. Even then, everyone seemed to agree which songs were too poppy and cheesy. Half the audience was content to watch, and the rest formed small groups at the foot of the stage, with one person at a time jumping into the middle of each circle for a quick dance.
Dream Team vs. 187, March 21, Portage Theater
