Paul and Sharon

Paul Overton and Sharon Ashe have been teaching and performing Lindy Hop in the Bay Area and around the globe for the past eight years. In that time they have built an extremely successful swing dance program based on their unique and effective style of teaching and have toured the U.S. and Europe spreading the joy of Lindy Hop. In San Francisco Paul and Sharon regularly teach over two-hundred students per month and run one of the largest weekly dance parties in town called the 9:20 Special. They have had the good fortune to teach and perform at some of the biggest and most well respected dance camps in the world including Swing Camp Catalina, Swing Out New Hampshire, and Herrang Dance Camp in Sweden. Currently, they live happily in Oakland, California with their dogs, Boyd and Pete.

Jason and Sylvia

Sylvia Sykes studied with the great dancer Dean Collins, and was a member of his last dance troupe. She studied Balboa with Maxie Dorf and spent years learning from the greatest Southern California Balboa dancers. She is a two time inductee into the California Swing Dance Hall of Fame. She won the US Open twice, was the NASDE top point winner, third place in the National Carolina Shag Dance Championships, won many Strictly Swing contests through the US. She also represented the US in the World Boogie Woogie Championships in Grenoble, France. She is the undefeated California Balboa champion.

Jason Christodoulou, a talented dancer, choreographer, and teacher from the San Francisco Bay Area will be joining Sylvia. Known for his incredible versatility, energy, and style, Jason knows how to motivate dancers! His performing group, Loose Change, took 2nd place this year in the US Open Cabaret Division (Hip Hop). He is also the co-founder of the most popular swing events in San Francisco, the Dog House Party.  

Jeff and Elaine

Jeff and Elaine began teaching together in 1998. In 1999 they were invited to assist with the Ft. Worth/Dallas Ballet production, Rite of Swing. In late 2000, after extensive study of Salsa in Miami, Jeff and Elaine began teaching the famed 1950's dance, Salsa Rueda. In addition to teaching Lindy Hop to hundreds of students in Dallas, they have been involved in the local community through working with after-school programs, the Dallas Swing dance Society and the Dance Council.

Kwikstep and Rokafella

Gabriel “KWIKSTEP” Dionisio
Hip-Hop dancer/choreographer Gabriel “KWIKSTEP” Dionisio was born and raised in New York city. At the age of eight Kwikstep watched the duo “Sheilds and Yarnell” on Soul Train and was inspired to dance. He began learning techniques such as Poppin and Boogaloo. When he attended local block parties in ’82, he joined his friends who were breaking and was slowly becoming well rounded in all these street dance styles. His first tour was with the “New York Express” around China at the age of nineteen which took him on a 12 city trip. By 1991 he had won the Bessie award for choreography. Today he is best known for his versatility and for his signature headspins.

He has been in several dance companies such as Rhythm Technicians, GhettOriginal- with whom he toured the world in “Jam on the Groove”, Nike Culture Shock, New Power Generation, and Full Circle Productions- an organization he founded in ’92. He has done commercial work for Dr. Pepper, Levi’s, and a Spike Lee commercial for IAM.com. He recently appeared in “the Daily Show” with Jon Stewart. Will Smith called on him to represent the break dance aspect of the century in the millennium performance for Bill Clinton. Some video work includes Mariah Carey, Will Smith, KRS-One, and Lords of the Underground.

He traveled to Japan in a production with the National Museum of American History/ Smithsonian Institute and then returned as part of a duo with his wife to do local club engagements. He has been flown across the United States and Europe on several occasions to speak on panels and to judge dance competitions.

He teaches a one of a kind Hip-Hop technique class at the Broadway Dance Center so that students unaware of the Hip-Hop lifestyle can learn the history and the meaning behind the movement. The Point in the Bronx is a community center known for the special programs they offer to the neighborhood and Kwikstep is well respected for the breakdance class that he offers as well as his mentoring of the youths that come to explore the possibilities of a career in performance.

Hip-Hop is all Kwikstep has known and it has brought him this far in his life. He hopes to one day have his own school of urban arts and to produce a traveling production. His dream is to provide options to the teens of today who like him are presented with street life as the only way to live. –
“it’s not the moves that make you a dancer it’s your spirit.. your soul”.

Anita “ Rokafella” Garcia

Hip-Hop dancer/choreographer Ana “Rokafella” Garcia was born in Spanish Harlem where she grew up with a strong Latin background. She participated in school recitals and community events. At the age of 16 she began going to clubs and started to do back up dancing for freestyle singers in the local NYC party scene.

Her Hip-Hop style of dancing become her bread and butter when she began street performing with such crews such as The Transformers, The Breeze Team, and the New York City Float Committee. In ‘94 she met Kwikstep who urged her to audition for GhettOriginal- a Hip-Hop dance company. She was cast and became further exposed to the old school dance technique as she traveled around Europe.

After experiencing international appreciation for Hip-Hop, she decided to present classes back home to prevent it’s fading away. She has taught workshops at NYU and Howard as well as neighborhood high schools and community centers. When she was hired to teach cardiovascular classes at various gyms, she incorporated the old school styles along with the new trends in the dance scene in order to bridge the gap.

There has been a resurgence of breaking, locking and popping in the Hip-Hop media, so the videos she’s appeared in feature her unique ability as a female. She and her husband founded Full Circle Productions-a Hip-Hop collective of artists who understand the cultural value of these urban art forms. They hope to someday have their own school and traveling production.

Rokafella co-hosted an Internet radio show called 88 Hip-Hop, where she interviewed pioneers in her Hip-Hop History segment. She represents the positive image of a woman confident in both her Puerto Rican and Hip-Hop cultures. She’s done work for artists like Will Smith, Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston and Tito Puente to name a few. She believes this culture was born to help the urban youth get through the ups and downs of life with something to hold on to.

CAREN CADILE
Caren has performed and choreographed for several Bay Area rhythm-based dance companies and is a member of Aguas da Bahia, Dancers Without Borders, and Quimbanda, a percussion ensemble. She has studied rhythm tap, jazz, ballet, ethnic, hip-hop, and modern dance extensively and feels fortunate to have studied with great hoofers such as Gregory Hines, Eddie Brown, Brenda Buffalino and Savion Glover. Currently she teaches rhythm tap classes at DanceMission in San Francisco. She encourages her students to incorporate a lot of body movement with emphasis on rhythm and personal expression. Caren is looking forward to seeing everyone bust out at the fest again.

Dawn Hampton

Dawn Hampton comes from a long line of musicians and entertainers. She has been a dancer since the time she could walk and watching her cut the rug is a musicality lesson in itself. Her presence is always one of the highlights of the festival.

Grover Sales

Grover comes from Louisville, Kentucky. It was on a radio broadcast there in about 1935, when he was sixteen years old, that he first heard the Benny Goodman band with Gene Krupa on drums. As he explains, "It was a religious experience. I’d never heard anything like it. I went to bed and had a high fever. My mother had to rub my chest with Musterol, and I’ve never been the same since. It took over my life."

Grover remained an outsider throughout his high school days in Louisville. "No one would speak to me because of the music I was listening to. They thought it was really strange, because the hippest things they were listening to were Hal Kemp, or Russ Morgan, or Skinnay Ennis, things like that."

In 1938, Sales moved to Boston, where he ran with a jazz crowd and heard Benny Goodman and other bands in person. Then one afternoon, listening to the radio, he had a second religious experience when he heard Duke Ellington’s "Black and Tan Fantasy."
"I went out of my goddamn mind. I ran to the local record store and said, 'What have you got by Duke Ellington? I want all of it!'  He says, 'Son, you can’t afford it.' I said, 'How much could I get for fifteen dollars?' Records were thirty-five cents apiece in those days. So I got a whole bunch of Ellington records.

"From then on, I got a hold of books and magazines, and started to listen to the history of this music," recalls Sales these many years later. "I started to listen to early Louis Armstrong, the Earl Hines, Coleman Hawkins, and Fletcher Henderson bands, Art Tatum, and all the rest of them. That's how it got started." read more.....