Video by Courtney Pedroza
The beat drops, and so do the dancers. They stand in a circle around 15-year-old student Destiny Stevens. With every movement, hair flip and twist of her body, she demands attention. The dance moves are raw. She is improvising, and together she and the crowd are cyphering.
Cyphers: The Center for Urban Arts opened three years ago in north Phoenix. It has become a place where all of hip-hop’s elements could be localized and taught to approximately 30 students.
The studio is now located at the Phoenix Center for the Arts in downtown Phoenix, but it continues to provide a place where students can come and be themselves without judgment, Cyphers founder Danny “Skooby” Morales said.
“To me, hip-hop has multiple personalities, and it depends on which environment you may catch it in,” Morales, 38, said. “In this environment you’re going to see nothing but positivity and people inspiring and people uplifting each other.”
The Cyphers group is a family, one that meets on Mondays to study hip-hop culture. The organization holds five classes throughout the night that teach graffiti art, dance and mixing vinyl records to the students, some starting at ages as young as 5 years old.
The kids struggle to find a place where they can fully embrace hip-hop culture, but Cyphers aims to give them that opportunity to be themselves, Cyphers staff said.
If kids have a safe place to express their culture, Morales said, it is less likely that they will lash out and commit crimes that are associated with hip-hop, such as graffiti vandalism.
“If we provide them a place where they can still be themselves and do the art forms, then they are going to come here to do that,” he said. “They are not going to be in the streets doing something else, because they have this.”
The Neighborhood Services Department of the city of Phoenix spends more than $2 million a year covering up graffiti, said Erynn Crowley, the department’s deputy director. This number covers the cost of staff and the equipment used to cover the graffiti.
During Cyphers’s graffiti-art class, students practice on paper, paint on canvas and collaborate on murals together. Some students who have “bombed,” or done graffiti illegally, no longer think vandalism is a good idea. They say the risks outweigh the benefits.
“If I were to get arrested right now, I’ll probably lose everything that I have,” 21-year-old student and staff member Ivan Garcia said.
When he first started with Cyphers two years ago, Garcia vandalized property often. He thought he was the “dopest person ever” when he first started, but realized he didn’t know as much as he thought.
“One of the reasons I stopped actually was because of the Cyphers,” Garcia said.
Teachers at the Cyphers showed him canvas and brushes. Today, Garcia prefers those to bombing, and he even teaches the Graffiti 101 class.
Cyphers provides classrooms to learn in as opposed to learning from the streets. The curriculum for every class includes the history and the adaptation of each topic, so the students can have a greater respect for what they are learning.
In the record-mixing class, before the students can touch a turntable, they sit and take notes about the invention of the scratch. By the end of the class, the students are able to complete three basic scratch techniques.
“They don’t just teach you a move, or teach you how to scratch, or teach you how to make a line with paint,” Stevens said. “They teach you the history, then you slowly grow into learning different things.”
There are three different dance classes, and Marcus Jones, 19, teaches two. Jones and his dance crew, called the Elektrolytes, were named the champions of America’s Best Dance Crew in June 2012.
Jones first teaches the b-boy class, with kids ages 6-15. In this class, he teaches the four elements of breaking — top rocks, footwork, power and freezes. For him, working with the kids of this age group is the most challenging and rewarding to do.
In Jones’ second class, he teaches hip-hop choreography. Every Monday, Jones comes into class with a new sequence of steps for the group to learn. These classes teach students how to control their body and gain rhythm.
The teachers at Cyphers do this for their love of the culture and the kids, Morales said. They want to teach so the students can get better and grow.
“Here, if we raise these kids to know what real hip-hop is and spread love, peace, hope and art, and really just the expression of it, then they’re going to grow old to feel that and spread that,” Jones said.
Nick Villarreal teaches the third dance class, popping. This is where the dancer matches the music to different parts of their body, and emphasizes each beat by drawing attention to it with a sharp movement.
Since the popping is more of a “do rather than teach” style of dance, the group runs drills and exercises. These activities give students the opportunity to create their own dance set or freestyle.
The popping class concludes Monday night for Cyphers. But every week the kids don’t want to leave right away, and the same thing always happens.
Villarreal will “happen” to leave the music on and the kids will “on their own” start to cypher. They form a circle around one person who showcases what he or she has been working on, then another person follows, until Morales has to lock up for the night.
The dancers also put these skills into action every First Friday at a booth they set up on Roosevelt Street. They create a “cypher circle,” but with half of the circle open to passersby, who crowd around to see the kids dance.
According to many members of Cyphers, including Stevens, Morales and Jones, hip-hop is misunderstood, so they reach out to the community in multiple ways to break the stereotype. They perform at events, but they also go to schools to give presentations about hip-hop culture to students and teachers.
Cyphers was created for the community’s youth so they could have a place to express themselves through hip-hop culture. After three years, Cyphers has been doing just that, Morales said. Cyphers has given kids the opportunity to create.
They beautify everything. They build this environment and they motivate us through the pieces that they do, Morales said. “They are talking to you, they are showing you a message, they are communicating with you. Through art.”
Contact the reporter and videographer at Courtney.Pedroza@asu.edu.
