KING CHARLES; ‘I was like, That’s it, that
right there is going to get me out of trouble’

The Chicago footworks phenomenon on his early exposure to street dance culture, his family's involvement in the genre and the importance of Chicago
as a city.

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I'm texting Charles to make sure he's still on for our interview. After a minute, I get a WhatsApp call from him, telling me he's on his way down the elevator. Yesterday he arrived from the states. Are you feeling jet lagged?

Not really jetlagged. But I didn't manage to sleep a lot on the 14-hour plane ride here. I have been traveling since yesterday, and last night me and my friend went for a walk to see the city.

I know that Charles is an icon in the Footwork scene and has been around for quite a while but I'm curious about the spark behind what became Charles's passion. How did you find street dance, or how did street dance find you?

I want to say, my family. I've been dancing since I was 3. That's also the oldest footage of me. Probably because everybody in my family is a musician, former musician, or entertainer. During the holiday, we just all get together and entertain each other. Right now my family is not working as musicians or entertainers, except me and my father. My father is a traveling guitar player.
So that's how I got introduced, with artists such as MC Hammer, Bobby Brown, and Michael Jackson. These people and my cousins were inspiring me. I was born in 86, so I was doing the dances of the 90s. My first introduction to the Chicago footwork style was when I was around 13-14 years old.

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We continue to talk about Chicago, Charles Hometown, and the conversation taps into artists such as Twista and Chance the Rapper. I recently came across an interview with the rap artist Common, where he talked a lot about how crucial Chicago has been to his creation, and I'm curious if Charles feels the same way. How important is Chicago for your work?

I was living there until I was 24 years old, and then I moved to Los Angeles. I lived in LA for eight years, and then my wife and I bought a house and moved to Arizona in 2019. Chicago has been the driving force of my career and my communication with people, even though I haven’t lived there for a while. I am the creative director of a nonprofit organization that gives back to the communities and the youth, and one of our main places that we give back to, is Chicago. So I’m always there now, and I’m finding myself building more and more with the community. I´m seeing the magic from a different angle now. A lot of my motivation comes from Chicago. It has a lot of magic and a lot of fire. This fire transforms into passion and beautiful creativity, if the kids have outlets to use it that way. I’m one of the people providing more outlets now, so yeah, I can see why Common goes back, you know. Because it probably did the same thing for him as it did for me.

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Other rappers appear in the conversation, and for me, as a non-American, it seems like Chicago always has been keen on collaborations. Artists and collectives such as Noname, Pivot Gang, Mick Jenkins, and Smino, to name a few. I wonder what makes the city stand out and why Chicago dares to push the boundaries in different cultural expressions.
Yeah, we’re different for sure. I mean, both the music creativity, dance and our approach to hip-hop. I grew up as an MC as well. The first artist I was studying was Twista. I was studying his rhyming patterns and the way that he was writing, and then I ended up being a background dancer for him, but it’s crazy how life works.
Charles mentions Twista, the world record breaker in fast rapping, and draws parallels from his way of rapping to the way Charles dances.
I mean, it's just how he likes to translate what he is saying and how he breaks down the words in a specific way with the rhythms. The rhythm is the most beautiful part of how Twista raps, and that’s the same way I approach Chicago footwork. I know most people look at it like all i'm focused on is how fast i'm going, but I’m just following the music and the rhythms that are in the music because I do Chicago footwork to whatever music. 160 BPM is the norm, but we’re both from the same tradition, Twista from the West Side of Chicago, our families originally from the West Side of Chicago, but they moved to the South Side, and the West Side is the raw side, like where there’s a lot of like origin of creation come from. Then creative development of the shapes, a lot of times, in my opinion, comes from the south side. We refine the thing that might have been from the West side, and then we turn it into something else.

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I'm asking Charles about the strong connection between the music scene and the dance scene. Lately it feels like the different branches do not cross as often but Chicago might be an exception?

Chicago footwork exists because this was our native dance, and it’s everywhere you go in the African-American communities. There weren't many other options, so for sure, even if you didn’t do the dance, you knew a couple of steps because it was in peoples houses, at the schools and stuff. It began in the warehouse and spread to the African-American communities, who had dance groups which incorporated this music into their performances in the 80s. Chicago footwork is about 40 years old and it descended from jacking and percolators. So we have a lot of roots there, and I know that me, and for example Chance the Rapper, were raised right in the heart of that timeline. I’m not the creator, you know. Anyone that’s in their 30s is not the creator. My teacher's teachers are in their 50s. We were right behind them. It's interesting how hip-hop got supported by Chicago. But it makes sense, especially if a lot of the stories come from struggle. Chicago has been through struggle. There’s a lot of pressure there. The city is pressuring you to be great. The system just presumes you to be the best version of yourself, or at least reveals that option. I know my cousin hates me for telling this story, but he wasn’t the best guy back when we were young. He had a lot of anger, and he learned how to wrestle. Let's just say, he didn’t use it in the right way. Nowadays he’s a great guy and a father, but back then he was becoming like a really high-level version of himself with these skills, in a bad manor. In Chicago everything is intensified and very clear. The answers are very fast, and you can make very clear choices real fast. So we know that all these kids have this fire, and we really try to navigate the flame because it’s going to go somewhere. But if we can navigate we’re getting way more talented individuals, and at the same time we also giving back to the community.  We’re motivating more of our teachers, who retired from dance, to come back and keep this flame alive in all different generations.
Now I’m doing projects with my organization where we’re doing this thing called “bridge work”. We did our first session where there were live musicians from jazz and from R&B, and we placed them in a room together with dancers. My father was one of the musicians, and then we had dancers from different dance groups, producers in the same room with the musicians and videographers. We even had spectators who shared the vibe, and we all just danced, played and freestyled the whole thing. A huge jam session between different generations and it was so magical.  Even the finished product of the Chicago footwork track (that was produced after sampling all the sounds from the jazz) turned out amazing. Everything was beautiful, and now we want to do this in all our regions in the United States, because we have these connections with musicians and dancers from different generations. Why not bring them together instead of staying separated?

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What's the purpose behind your dance?

My biggest passions are communication and connection. Both were very important for me in my own neighborhood growing up. I stuck out because most people wear dark skin, and I was light skinned. I grew up in an aggressive environment, I knew that things could go bad if I didn’t figure out what the translation of this area was and what the communication points were. So I started trying to get to know some of the people. Both the rougher people and the more chill ones. Basically all types of people. One thing that a lot of them had in common was Chicago footwork. I was like, That’s it, that right there is going to get me out of trouble. So it wasn’t only because the dance was cool. It was a survival thing and and a connection point I started to translate to the people around me who I am. Hello, my name is Charles, this is how I feel, this is my creative color. My creative colors might look like your creative colors. Let’s connect. In Japan, they have a saying, I don’t know how to say it in Japanese, but it’s the saying is, “The nail that sticks out gets hammered” So it’s a little similar in Chicago even though we all want to stick out we still have to show that we have some type of root of the same communication to bring comfort to insecurities. I wanted to make people feel comfortable around me, you know. But once I got the connections with my own city, that wasn’t enough for me; I wanted to connect with the world. I just felt like my perspective could be of service to someone, and so I used dance to create that connection so that we could get into more types of communication later because those same people in Chicago who saw me dance eventually came around and asked me questions, you know, or they allowed me to ask them questions. I just really want to connect because I feel like connecting is healing. And I’m not a fan of disconnection unless I need time for myself, which is still me connecting with myself.

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Interlocutor: Mattis
Photographs by Sophie Tracy May
October 30, 2024
Shot at Surr Malmö 2024

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