News and Press Quotes
07/29/2008
Miami Dance Company Garners National Acclaim
MIAMI (CBS4) ― High energy performances packed with explosive dance moves and daring acrobatics are trademarks of Miami's own Live In Color Dance Collective which continues to make a name for itself across the country. The group performed on The Jim and Jade Show on Tuesday morning and brought the studio to life. .01/29/2008
From DC to MTV, LIVE IN COLOR Brings It with Unique Urban Flava!
07/17/2000
Hip-hop troupe leader Zedric Bembry has never learned how to dance; he prefers teaching it.
Miami Herald
By Lori Theresa Yearwood
MIAMI - Truth is, he started backward, brooding over borrowed ballet books, gleaning poses and postures after he was already dancing them.
It doesn't make sense, that someone could do what he has not learned. It isn't even slightly logical.
But that's the thing about talent.
You can't explain it.
Zedric Bembry, child of a printer and a wedding dress maker, simply started dancing. He remembers being 3 or 4, watching his aunties dance with his uncles to fast-paced, heart pumping, Michael Jackson songs in his mother's living room.
Then running into his bedroom, shutting the door and doing his own versions of what he had seen. When his mother caught him spinning and strutting, she tried to show him off to company. But little Zedric hid behind the door.
``I don't know why I did that,'' he says.
Zedric is 29 now, director of his own dance company, Live in Color. The troupe includes 20 young people Zedric plucked from the streets and playgrounds of inner-city Miami. The youngest is 12, the oldest 30.
Together they mix hip-hop, jazz, ballet and a pinch of salsa into an undefineable, high-voltage funk. First a pirouette. Then a booty shake. Then a kickball-change jazz step. Then a high grande-jete, a ballet leap. Reach, flow, jerk, strut. Fast. Slow.
Unexpectedly nonlinear movement _ and progress _ for a troupe that has performed in Spain and plans to go to Atlanta _ and which, just last year, was dancing in the streets because it couldn't afford to rent a studio (the dancers made do with a boom box and the driveway in front of Zedric's mother's house).
Zedric choreographs pieces by snatching movement from wherever he can: Olympic gymnasts he watches on television, for example. Or classical ballets. He calls his mimicry ``mocking a step.'' Sometimes he doesn't know the names of them. Why should he?
He has never taken a dance class in his life.
``I've only taught them,'' he says, as if this makes perfect sense.
To some dance traditionalists, hip-hop is the step-child of the dance world, a form of movement that doesn't require much refinement. Until they see Zedric and his company.
Debbie Austin, who danced with the New York City Ballet for eight years and is now the ballet mistress of the Raleigh Durham Carolina Ballet:
"`I'm not nuts about hip-hop. But when I saw Zedric, he made me believe hip-hop is an art form. If he was promoted correctly and got some exposure, there is no telling how far he could go. I really believe in him.''
Jackie Tobacco, owner of the Broward Center of Dance in Davie, Fla., who invited the struggling artist to come out of the streets and into her studio to dance the first time she saw him move:
``I couldn't take my eyes off him _ it was like there was electricity going through him.''
Training is almost always necessary. After all, Tobacco points out, she wouldn't have a dance studio if she didn't think that. But once in a while, someone simply has it all: the body built for dancing _ long limbs, flexible muscles, arched feet _ the mind that thinks in music and movement, and most of all, the heart.
The dancers of Live in Color can spin on the ground and pirouette in the air. One of them, a 15-year-old named Cass Smith, who has never taken a ballet class, can do fouettes, one of the most technically difficult steps in ballet. (The dancer stands on the ball of the foot of one leg while using the whipping motion of the other leg to spin as many times as possible _ without moving from the exact spot from which the first turn began.)
``Most dancers stand at the barre and work for years,'' says Janine Thompson, who choose Zedric from hundreds of hopefuls to dance for the Sol Patrol, the dancers for the women's basketball team, Miami Sol. He didn't know all the steps but he had an unmatchable verve and energy that stood out, she says. She wasn't worried about the steps, she says; those were technicalities he could learn later.
And so those who have seen Zedric and his company know that his is not another story about another hip-hop group trying to make a fast splash. Zedric says he doesn't care if a big company asks him to join its ranks. He hasn't even auditioned for one.
``I've always wanted to do something different,'' he says. ``When I go to ballet shows I see different costumes and different steps, but in the end, it's all the same.''
Reality is, most of his dancers wouldn't have a place to dance if it weren't for Live in Color. Some of them aren't tall. Some of them aren't thin. Most of them haven't taken dance classes for the simple reason they can't afford them. Put them under Zedric's encouraging eye and it's a moot point.
``Before Zedric I was on the drill team at school, and no one really noticed me,'' says Katrina Hughes, one of his lead dancers. ``But when Zedric watched me dance he saw something and he put me right up front.''
Like the others in the group, Katrina cannot say _ or do _ enough to show her devotion. Twice a week, she takes a bus from Carol City to Davie for rehearsals.
Even when it's raining and it takes two hours to get there. Lots of her friends work part-time jobs for extra money _ she's in a studio dancing for free.
But adulation doesn't pay the rent _ Zedric, who lives with his aunt, says he earned about $3,000 last year. And once in a while, when he has to borrow money to put gas in his car, he wonders if the path he has picked for himself makes sense. ``I start thinking that maybe I should quit because maybe I'm going to get older and have nothing.''
Then he thinks about how much he loves to dance and what his dancers would do without Live in Color. Kids like Cass, a teenager with big brown eyes, corn rows and that knack for triple fouettes.
``Zedric is like my big brother,'' Cass says. ``Without him, I would be running the streets, doing stuff like jumping over fences instead of fouettes.''
His real big brother, Antonio, was shot in the face and killed three years ago. Now he has Zedric, who picks him up, lends him his dance clothes and brings him to dance rehearsals.
It's Wednesday night. Rehearsal for Live in Color is starting. Rows of young people in sweat pants and pony-tails are getting ready to dance. There is something audacious here. Something that makes you draw in your breath.
``A five, six, seven, eight.''
Get ready.
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PHOTO available from KRT Photo Service, 202-383-6099.
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(c) 2000, The Miami Herald.
Visit The Miami Herald Web edition on the World Wide Web at http://www.herald.com/
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
