Flex’n Korea 让身体曲尽奇妙

When Ming dances, he seems to hover just above the floor, gliding with patterned footwork resembling an interdimensional moonwalk. Then there’s Mutant, who contorts his arms out behind him in a bone-breaking knot, rippling them as he slides forward like a jellyfish. These two dancers are South Korean kids, but the dance style they’re performing—flexing or “flexn”—was created by Black kids in Brooklyn’s Caribbean neighborhoods. So how did an underground dance from New York find its way to the other side of the world? The internet, obviously. But it also has to do with the dedication of these young dancers determined to learn everything they could, even making pilgrimages to Brooklyn to experience the flexing scene firsthand.

The history of flexing stretches all the way back to Jamaica with a dancer known as Bruk Up. In the early 1990s, he came up with a series of wildly popular dance moves while touring with famous dancehall artists. That music and his moves trickled down to parties in Brooklyn, where lots of kids with immigrant parents from the Caribbean called home. A dance style created in the mid-90s, the bruckup, was even named after him and is considered the precursor to flexing; its moves and attitude directly inspiring its younger sibling scene. But it was the weekly Flex N Brooklyn event that was most instrumental to the style’s popularity, and where flexn got its name.  The show, which launched in 1992 and was aired on public access television, was so popular that it lasted 15 years. Because of it, flexing coalesced into its own culture, with its own dancers, crews, moves, and music—all broadcast directly into people’s homes.

By 2005 it had become a distinct culture and officially earned its own name. The moves that make up its foundation include “gliding,” and “bone-breaking,” but also “pausing,” where a dancer’s moves are stopped in brief, jagged intervals as if they’re hitting invisible walls, and “connecting,” where each movement comes in contact a different body part, the hand to an elbow to the shoulder and so on.

All the subgenres of reggae dancing coexisted in Brooklyn with the brukup, shotta dance, and flexing each finding space on the floor. From the skating rink and social clubs, to parks and basketball courts, it was all fair game. But in 2007, upticks in violence caused the closure of many venues. Flex N Brooklyn was also canceled around this time. Flex dancers had to regroup. They went underground and focused on battling, which was always a part of the culture but they boiled it down until the scene was primarily about competition, almost entirely leaving parties behind. Most of the dancers would practice in anticipation for events like Battlefest and DREAM Ring, where the majority of people in attendance were other dancers. Youtube was also coming into the picture, and dancers could upload their moves to the internet and be viewed across the world.

These days, the culture has spread far beyond Brooklyn, spreading roots to upstate New York, neighboring Long Island, across the river in New Jersey, and down south in Virginia. There are scenes in UK cities and Paris, in Russia, and now this nascent community in South Korea.

Mutant, whose given name is DoHeon Lee, was the first to discover flexing in Korea. Now 20 years old, he started dancing when he was 13 years old and attending middle school in Busan. “I always wanted to stand out, to be unique,” he says. He trawled Youtube looking for different dance styles, dabbling in different genres like hip hop and breakdancing before finally settling on flexing. “After a year I found flexing and knew it was what I wanted to do.” Bone-breaking was his first experience with the style, and he just kept digging deeper and deeper, absorbing every scrap of information he could find. “I watched endless videos and knew all the dancers by heart.” At school he started a dance club and they practiced at each others’ houses. “We didn’t have a studio so we’d just dance in front of the glass door window at night where we could see our reflection,” he laughs.

Eventually, he met Ming, whose full name is Mingyu Hwuang. He was also from Busan and had been a hip hop dancer for six years already. Ming was already incorporating some bone-breaking into his routines but Mutant introduced him to the other parts of flexing. 

“When I watched them battle, it seemed like a show to me,” Ming says, explaining what drew him to the style. “The concepts they come up with are trippy.”

There were a few other flex dancers in Seoul and other places across South Korea, so in 2018 they all decided to come together as a crew called CTPZ. First, Mutant recruited Undead, otherwise known as Jeon Young, who would eventually become the team leader. Undead’s wife BB also started flexing and joined CTPZ along with two other dancers, Minjun and Bruce.

With the Korean scene growing, Ming decided to travel to Brooklyn to connect with dancers there. He wanted to understand flexing better, and he was feeling the limitations of learning from afar. The fact that he hardly spoke any English didn’t stop him at all. “One of the first things I learned there was how a dancer’s style is based on their lives,” he says. “They pull their inspiration directly from their life. That was really impressive to me, seeing how they translate that into dance moves.” In Brooklyn, he was invited to compete in the flexing battle Off The Grid, where he took first place. At the competition, you can see the confidence and joy in his move as he glides about the dancefloor. At one point, he even playfully sticks his tongue out without skipping a beat as the crowd cheers him on.

Later that year, Hitmakerchinx (whose given name is Rafael Martin), a well-known flex dancer and music producer from New York, visited Seoul as part of a mini Asia tour. Mutant traveled a few hours by train from Busan just to meet him.

“Seeing a Korean in a durag by itself was very surprising, but I found it exciting,” Hitmakerchinx laughs. “His whole style and swagger, his persona, is that of a flexer. Seeing him mimic that just from Youtube was mindboggling, like wow, you really love this shit.”

The next time the American flexer visited Korea, he met some other members of CPTZ and was equally impressed. “It’s surprising, uplifting, inspiring—all of those words at once. It made me feel good seeing other people tap into something from the whole other side of the world. They really put in the effort to understand the culture. I don’t think it’s necessary for a dancer to go to their lengths. Necessary is a strong word. But if you really love it and want to learn and be involved authentically, I’d expect them to try and link with someone from the culture’s origins.”

The next year it was Mutant’s turn to visit New York. “Since I already knew who all the Brooklyn dancers were and had been adding them on Facebook, they were leaving comments on my page urging me to visit,” he recalls. “When I decided to go I let people know I was on my way. Hitmakerchinx made a group chat with other dancers there. “Lots of dancers offered to help; pretty much everyone was helpful,” Mutant says. First, he competed at Battle Of The Godz 7. At the end of that battle, he performed a hat trick where he spun it around behind his back and then shot it into the crowd. When someone flung it back to him and he caught it while bone-breaking, the circle exploded and everyone poured into the center in excitement. Even his competitor was showing him love. It was a clear victory. He also competed in Off The Grid and placed second.

In Korea, flexing has failed to grow beyond the original six dancers so far. Ming says he teaches some workshops and that the kids seem serious about it, but he still hasn’t seen much growth outside those classes. There are other styles of street dancers and even a dancehall community in the country, but their reaction to flexing tends to be mixed. Ming competes in some battles with hip-hop dancers and says it’s younger kids who tend to be the ones that like flexing while many others consider it too strange and unfamiliar. Mutant, who now lives in Seoul, says he’s observed even less interest. “Other street dancers don’t really know about flexing yet so we just perform at their events instead of battling,” he says. “We used to try and let everyone know about flexing and invite other dancers to try it out, but they’re not too interested.”

The reaction from non-dancers has been more positive, however, and CTPZ has shifted their focus towards the wider public, though it’s led to a fracture within the dancers and Ming has left the team. “I’m more interested in dancing than turning it into some commercial career,” he says.

Undead is less focused on flexing these days and more interested in the practical applications of the dance moves. “Flexing appealed to me because my personal style is very flexible,” he says, “But now I’m learning more genres and applying them to my career.”

Flexing has had significant success in the Korean entertainment world, with the dance performed on local television shows and with famous musicians like (G)I-DLE and Jay Park. Pretty much every zombie movie in Korea has flex dancers in it, with Undead choreographing zombies’ movements in everything from Train To Busan to the Netflix show Kingdom. “People here often find flexn scary,” Undead laughs. So it’s a perfect fit.

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Contributor: Mike Steyels
Photographer: Chris da Canha
Chinese Translation: Olivia Li