Brian “Footwork” Green: The Rhythm, the Roots, and the Responsibility of Legacy

Dance Mogul Magazine · The Legacy · House Dance

Brian Footwork Green: The Rhythm, the Roots, and the Responsibility of Legacy

From a church block in Harlem to Paradise Garage, from Mýa’s “Free” to the House Dance Conference, the New York house dancer who turned club knowledge into a world classroom, and then asked who gets paid when a culture becomes an industry.

November 10, 2026 · Dance Mogul Magazine · Legacy Feature

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Before the nickname, there was a boy from Bayside watching his mother dance.

Brian Green has told the story more than once. He was a shy kid from a residential, upper-middle-class corner of Queens whose family drove into Harlem on Sundays for church and during the week so he could help his grandmother. The block parties outside that church were a different world from Bayside, louder and rougher, and inside his own family the music never stopped. His mother danced salsa and hustle and freestyle hustle steps with a funky groove; she knew dances from several African traditions and put reel-to-reel tapes and television specials in front of him before he understood what he was watching. His older brother Oscar rocked, did electric boogie, snaked and waved. A cousin studied ballet, tap and jazz. Decades later, asked for the most memorable moment of his dancing life, Green did not name an award show or a music video. He named the first time he watched his mother dance.

That is the right place to begin, because Brian Footwork Green is a legacy about receiving before it is a legacy about inventing. He received rhythm from tap and from his mother’s hustle, the boogie from his brother, the club from older dancers who let a teenager stand close enough to learn. What he built from it, a footwork style fast enough to become his name, an award-winning music video, a conference that put the pioneers of five dance styles on one floor, a teaching life that runs through four continents, and an argument about money that most of the dance world would rather not have, is the subject of this feature.

Dance Mogul Magazine is writing it now, while he is still teaching, still travelling, still arguing, because a legacy documented while the source can correct it is worth more than a tribute written after the fact. This is not a finished chapter. It is a living source, and we have tried to separate what the record proves from what Green himself remembers, and to give the people around him, Dance Fusion, Ron Paisley, Damien and Spanky, Ana “Lollipop” Sanchez and Tyrone Proctor, the credit the history requires.

I dance each dance as if I were living a part of my life. Dance and life are intertwined.

— Brian “Footwork” Green, to The Middlebury Campus, February 2007

Brian Footwork Green at a Glance

A Shy Kid From Bayside and a Church Block in Harlem

Green’s published biographies do not agree on when he started dancing. The Peridance Center faculty page and his own House Dance Conference history say eight. Broadway Dance Center and his official site say seven. The ImPulsTanz festival archive in Vienna, written in 2003, says five, with African dances taught by his mother. DMM does not pretend to settle this. What every version shares is the household: a mother who danced socially and seriously, a brother in the first wave of New York’s electric boogie, and formal study layered on top.

His own training record, published on his website, is more specific than any school bio. Ten years of tap and jazz with Phil Black. Two years each of tap with Honi Coles, Buster Brown and Bettye Morrowe. Six years of modern and seven of ballet through Alvin Ailey and Joffrey programs. West African dance, popping, locking and house listed as learned “in the community,” with a year of locking study under Fred “Mr. Penguin” Berry and Greg “Campbellock Jr.” Campbell and five years of popping with Jazzy J. A 2014 tour biography adds that the tap began after his mother showed him films of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the Nicholas Brothers, the Berry Brothers and Honi Coles, and that he asked to learn it.

Green has said his brother introduced him to the boogie and snaking style in the late 1970s, around 1978 or 1979, and that Oscar’s creativity, fearlessness, angles, glides and hand play stayed with him. Peridance’s bio describes electric boogie as New York’s response to California’s locking and popping, and says Green chose it. That choice is where the formal child and the street child meet: a boy with a decade of tap under his feet, chasing a dance his brother brought home from the block.

Why does the training matter to a house dance story? Because the speed that later became his name did not come from nowhere. Tap is rhythm in the feet. Hustle and salsa are weight changes and turns. African dance is the groove under all of it. Green has said as much in his own words on the House Dance Conference page: his rhythm from tap and his mother’s intricate hustle, salsa and African steps, plus the inspiration of the club dancers, “eventually spawned a unique very fast footwork style.”

Roseland, 4Ds, Paradise Garage, the Tunnel: The Underground Classrooms

Between 1983 and 1984, by his account, Green went looking for more popping and found the New York underground. By the end of 1984 he says he understood hip-hop and club culture and was part of it. From 1984 to 1986 he found the freestyle and loft scene and the club and house scene at Roseland, 4Ds, Paradise Garage, the Tunnel and other rooms whose names now carry the weight of myth.

Two dancers changed his direction. His school biographies say he met Damien and Mike in 1986, and that in 1987 Spanky and Story became his “full inspirations” to immerse himself in house. His 2010 interview with the Liquid Metal blog places the Damien encounter in late 1986 or early 1987 and Spanky roughly two years later. The dates drift by a year or two depending on who is writing them down; the people do not. Damien, Green recalled, stood six foot nine or taller, could spin, work the floor and travel the whole club with smooth, syncopated footwork, and his skating became an influence from 1986 to 1988. Spanky was fifteen when they met, and his polyrhythmic footwork, precise isolations and coordinated arms, “a crazy freestyle” in Green’s words, shaped him from 1988 to 1992.

DMM has not been able to document fuller names or careers for Damien, Mike, Spanky or Story. We name them anyway, because Green names them every time, and because a history of house dance that only records the dancers who later became teachers is a history that forgets who taught the teachers.

For a lot of us, the club is family.

— Brian “Footwork” Green, in Check Your Body at the Door

That line comes from Check Your Body at the Door, the documentary that dance historian Sally R. Sommer spent decades producing with Archie Burnett about New York’s underground house dancers of the 1990s, directed by Charles Atlas and Michael Schwartz and released in 2011–12. Green is one of its profiled dancers, alongside Willi Ninja, Barbara Tucker and Burnett. The film’s title is the dancers’ own phrase: leave the body’s baggage at the door so the spirit can move. For a teenager from a quiet part of Queens, Green has said, the club was everything home was not: a family, a life, and for some of the wild kids he came up with, the thing that kept them out of jail.

How Footwork Became Footwork

Nobody handed Brian Green a nickname at a ceremony. It attached itself to him in the rooms above, where dancers were known by what they did. By the late 1980s the thing he did was move his feet faster and more intricately than the people around him, and “Footwork” followed him out of the clubs and, eventually, around the world.

This is the chapter where a legacy feature has to be careful. House dance was not invented by one person in one city. The music came out of Chicago, where “jacking” named both a movement and an experience; the dance in New York grew out of the 1970s loft and disco floors, out of Black and Latino social dances, out of hustle, salsa, tap, African dance, b-boying and the freestyle hip-hop clubs, and out of a generation of club dancers who were called “clubheads” before anyone called them house dancers. Green himself has said that the clubhead generation came a little before the generation of Marjory Smarth, Caleaf Sellers, Ejoe Wilson and Shan S, and that those dancers taught him their ways of moving to house music. On his own site he lists the people who carried the dance out of New York in the late 1980s: Voodoo Ray, Ejoe Wilson, Peter Paul, Caleaf Sellers, himself, Marjory “Larj Marj” Smarth, Sekou Williams, Joey Anderson, Justice, Brooklyn Terry, World Soul, Dance Fusion “and many more.”

So what, precisely, belongs to Green? Not house dance. Not house footwork as a category. What belongs to him is a way of doing it: a tempo and texture of footwork recognizable enough that other dancers named him for it, and later, a way of teaching it. Peridance’s bio describes him as one of the major contributors to the spread of house hip-hop around the world since 1992, with international dancers seeking him out in the United States. Fellow Peridance faculty member Huu Rock lists Green among the pioneers whose movement he studied, alongside Tone McGregor, Sekou Heru, Marjory Smarth, Buddha Stretch, Kim Holmes, Jazzy J, Mike Ufouria, Caleaf and Shan S. A dancer appears on lists like that for one reason: people learned from watching him.

Innovation inside a tradition is still innovation. The distinction DMM draws is between a style someone developed and a dance someone invented, and Green, in his own writing, draws the same one. His economic proposal, which we come to later, names Dance Fusion, Ejoe Wilson and himself as house dance innovators, and names no creator at all. That is an unusually honest piece of self-placement, and it sets the tone for how this feature treats him.

1992: World Soul and Dancing for the Room

In 1992, by his account, Green created World Soul. He described it in 2010 as a dance group formed to show the world the different feelings and grooves behind dance styles and to bring people together through dance. His school biographies call it a company focused on “the passion, history, and techniques” of various styles, and a 2014 tour biography says it performed in Europe and the United States.

What survives of World Soul in the public record is thin: a name, a founding year he has given consistently, a YouTube link in an old bio, and the fact that when he was asked in 2010 about inspiring moments with recording artists, he said his real inspiring moments came from choreographing for World Soul and the House Dance Conference crew. DMM has not found a membership list, a repertory or a performance history, and we flag that as an open question for the archive. What the record does show is that the idea behind World Soul, demonstrate the styles, teach the history, unite the room, is the same idea that produced the conference seven years later.

Mýa, “Free,” and the Night at the El Capitan

Mýa’s “Free” was released as a single on November 21, 2000, from the Bait soundtrack and the reissue of her album Fear of Flying. The video, directed by Dave Meyers, is a roller rink full of party dances, locking and waacking. Mýa told the music site LAUNCH at the time that those concepts were hers, that she found an underground dancer and choreographer named Brian Green and that the two of them put the routines together on their own. Working with someone from the underground, she said, was a fight, and also the best thing about the project, because she knew what he had to offer.

On Sunday, October 14, 2001, at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood, the seventh annual American Choreography Awards honored Green with Outstanding Achievement in Music Video, Hip-Hop, for “Free.” Tina Landon received the same honor in the same category for Mýa’s “Case of the Ex.” Variety and Backstage both carried the winners’ list that week; John O’Connell took the feature-film award for Moulin Rouge!, Michael Rooney won twice for Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice” and an Exxon/Mobil commercial, and Bob Mackie received the Governor’s Award. It was a room of more than a thousand people, with Carol Burnett and Debbie Allen in the seats. A club dancer from Queens walked out with the trophy for a video built on club dances.

The award is the most independently documented fact in Green’s career, and it is worth being precise about what it honors. It honors the choreographer. It does not measure the record: “Free” reached the top 50 of the Billboard Hot 100, number 4 in Australia and number 11 in Britain, and those are Mýa’s numbers, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’s numbers, Interscope’s numbers. What the award says is that in 2001, the people who judge choreography for the camera looked at a video that put the New York underground on a national screen and said: that is the best hip-hop dance on video this year.

Green’s own resume lists other commercial work around the same period, all of which DMM records as his account rather than independently confirmed credits: Lil’ Kim’s “Crush on You,” Lil’ Mo for BET’s Spring Bling, Foxy Brown on Showtime at the Apollo, Elsie Muniz, a Warner Bros. promo tour for Terri Dexter, Mýa at the Soul Train Awards, and the feature film Like Mike, where he lists himself as assistant to Lil’ Bow Wow. His bios add that he has choreographed for or danced with Mariah Carey, Missy Elliott, Salt-N-Pepa, Busta Rhymes, Barbara Tucker, Eve, Kraze and Masters at Work, and later versions add Gwen Stefani and Fergie. The Credit Record below separates what is verified from what is attributed.

Asked in 2010 what surprised him about the commercial side, his answers were not about glamour. As a choreographer, it was the lack of seriousness among dancers toward other dance styles and among artists toward learning dance at all. As a dancer, it was being treated as expendable. He praised Mýa and Barbara Tucker as performers who deserved more support, and said the experience was one reason he teaches more than he choreographs: “in hopes of raising the level in dance, physically and mentally.”

August 1999: Building the House Dance Conference

The House Dance Conference did not start as a brand. According to the history Green keeps on his own site, it started in conversations among prominent New York dancers who wanted an event that showed the power of dance and the education of dance while respecting lineage. The fuel, in his telling, came from three places: the dance group Dance Fusion, the organizer Ron Paisley, and Green himself, who performed with Dance Fusion between his choreography jobs. The first edition took place in August 1999.

Green became its talent coordinator for most shows and, by his account, its financier, which made him its public face. He has described the event as “edutainment” with the same premise as World Soul: pioneers flown in to perform, judge and teach, resident DJs playing deep and soulful house, workshops in the day and the party at night. Over the years its guest roster, as he lists it, included Don “Campbellock” Campbell, Sam “Boogaloo Sam” Solomon, Greg Campbellock Jr., Willi Ninja, Archie Burnett, Bravo, Klown, Flomaster, Adesola, DOC, Shaky Shake, Shock-a-Lock, Jazzy J, Disco Dave, Steve Glavin, Shallow, Stretch, Link and Ana “Lollipop” Sanchez. Those names belong to different years; DMM does not claim they all stood on the floor at the founding event. What the list shows is the conference’s reach: locking’s creator, popping’s creator, vogue’s most famous ambassador and New York’s hip-hop freestyle royalty, all under a house roof.

By 2010 he said the conference had run about ten years in New York and was now travelling. His 2014 bio counted twelve years “and counting.” Flyer credits on the archive page thank crews in San Francisco, France and Detroit for the years “HDC came to your town,” and a Bay Area edition ran over three days in April 2014. In 2007, according to DMM’s own 2013 feature on Tyrone “The Bone” Proctor, Proctor judged the first waacking competition at the conference, a detail that connects this chapter to the next one.

The honest framing is that the House Dance Conference was collaborative at birth and became Green’s to carry. Both halves are true. Dance Fusion, Caleaf Sellers, Sekou Heru and Tone McGregor among them, are already part of this magazine’s legacy archive; Ron Paisley is a name DMM would like to document further. The conference is the place where their generation’s idea of what a house event should be, education first, lineage respected, elders paid and honored, became a format that other cities copied.

2003: Reconnecting Generations Through Waacking

Punking and waacking were born in the 1970s in the gay clubs of Los Angeles, Black and Latino clubs where men danced to disco with a theatricality borrowed from silent-film sirens and a ferocity borrowed from the street. Soul Train carried it to television. The AIDS epidemic of the 1980s took many of its originators. By the late 1990s the dance was close to vanishing from public view, and Brian Green had nothing to do with any of that history. He has said so himself.

What he did, in the early 2000s, is documented in a 2023 article in the Nordic Journal of Dance by the dancer and researcher Alyssa Briteramos, who arrived in New York in January 2003 and spent two decades tracing the style. Green began folding waacking into his house classes at Fazil’s, the old, dusty Manhattan studio once used by tap legends. Interest grew into weekly classes and workshops at Broadway Dance Center and Peridance. Students asked where the dance came from. Green’s answer, over the next few years, was to bring the people who knew.

In 2003 he personally invited Ana “Lollipop” Sanchez, the Los Angeles locker and punking pioneer who had learned directly from the dance’s 1970s originators, to judge the House Dance Conference. Briteramos records that this is when the name “Punking” first reached the New York scene. From 2003 to 2007 Green and Sanchez collaborated: she taught workshops, performed, and passed on the history and the Los Angeles roots of the style. Tyrone Proctor, the Soul Train dancer who helped carry waacking around the world, judged the conference’s first waacking competition in 2007.

Green’s own account on his website is about restraint. Asked to teach the style when it first caught on, he says he answered, “I don’t know that style or the history that well,” and went to the originals first. He writes that each of them initially told him no, and that he then stepped back for close to ten years, taking classes and privates with the pioneers to be sure of what he was seeing before he taught it widely. A choreographer with an American Choreography Award could have packaged a hot style and sold it. He says he chose not to.

The students speak to what came out of that. Samara Cohen, known worldwide as Princess Lockerooo, found waacking in Green’s class at Broadway Dance Center in 2004, at nineteen; she has said he was the only person teaching it in New York then and that he introduced her to her mentor, Tyrone Proctor. The Works & Process series at the Guggenheim, presenting her company in 2022, described the 2000s waacking revival as “ignited by Brian ‘Footwork’ Green and pioneered by the late Tyrone ‘The Bone’ Proctor.” That is the right order of credit, and it is the order Green keeps himself.

The essential distinction: Green helped make waacking visible again in New York and helped a new generation find its elders. The dance’s origins belong to the Los Angeles communities who created it, its survival to Sanchez, Proctor, Viktor Manoel, Billy Goodson and others who kept it alive, and its global revival to a network of teachers and students far larger than one man. DMM’s features on Ana “Lollipop” Sanchez and Tyrone “The Bone” Proctor tell those stories.

Teaching Across Continents

The teaching life is the longest chapter and the hardest to count. Green’s bios say his classes have focused for years on the history of funk, hip-hop and house dance, spread through the United States, Europe, Asia and Africa, and that he has judged contests in those countries, including an appearance as a judge on So You Think You Can Dance in Singapore. His resume lists Hunter College and Queensborough Community College in New York, Howard University in Washington, UCLA in Los Angeles and Makki University in Tokyo; the Boys Choir of Harlem; studios from Broadway Dance Center, Peridance, Steps and Paul Pellicoro’s in New York to Millennium, Edge and Debbie Reynolds in Los Angeles; Studio Faith in Tokyo, Studio One in Hiroshima, Bounce in Sweden, Ones to Watch in Hong Kong; companies in Paris, San Francisco, Tokyo and Fukuoka; advisory staff for Red Bull Beat Riders; and panels and tours from a Savoy Ballroom tribute to Monsters of Hip-Hop. DMM records that list as his own, not as independently confirmed.

What is independently confirmed is enough to show the shape. The ImPulsTanz festival in Vienna, one of the largest dance festivals in the world, lists him teaching Hip Hop and House in 2002 and HipHop/House in 2003, with a bio that already called him one of the leading practitioners and teachers of house dance of the late 1980s and beyond. A student newspaper at Middlebury College recorded a February 2007 workshop in which he dismantled the word “hip-hop” as a label for the dances, taught popping, house footwork, the Fresno, the twist-o-flex and the original moonwalk, and told students that diligent practice was the key. A 2012 summer intensive filmed his house class. In April 2014 he judged Respect My Talent in St. Petersburg, Russia; that summer he toured Asia; in February 2017 an event in France listed him as a featured artist. In 2016 he and Princess Lockerooo waacked on stage during Robyn’s set at the Governors Ball festival in New York. In November 2025 the DanceHaus academy in Milan hosted a three-hour open class with him, billed as hip-hop and house with “the icon.”

His teaching philosophy, as he describes it, is history first. The Broadway Dance Center listing for his hip-hop class promises the names of the movements as they were called in New York’s underground clubs, how the dance travelled to the rest of the country, and the differences between hip-hop and the street jazz and funk that get mistaken for it. His house class begins with “jacking” as the foundation of the 1980s club movement. Since 2014 that curriculum has lived online at They Barely Understand Hello, where footwork series, isolations and grooves, and beginner and intermediate waacking classes sell for $25 to $40 each, and where, in 2024, he promised a series of dance critiques for students who want honest feedback.

The mistake we all make is when we think we have arrived.

— Brian “Footwork” Green, Liquid Metal interview, August 2010

Who Owns a Movement? The Brian Turn

Somewhere in Japan, a dancer watched Brian Green freestyle to hip-hop music, isolated one turn out of what he was doing, and taught it. The turn acquired a name. According to Green’s own website, the move is now known across Asia as the “Brian Turn,” and it was named, in his words, “unknown to Brian.”

DMM cannot tell you who named it or when; no independent documentation of the Brian Turn exists that we could find, and this account is his. But it is worth including because of the question it raises, which is the question underneath this whole feature. Movement travels faster than attribution. A dancer in Tokyo can learn a turn, name it, and teach it to a hundred students who will never know whether the man it is named for agreed, or was paid, or even knew. Green’s reaction has not been to claim the turn. It has been to use it as an example: if a move can carry someone’s name around the world without his knowledge, what else is moving around the world without the people who made it?

Economic Wisdom for Dancers

On the home page of his website, above the biography and the class store, Green has published a proposal he calls Economic Wisdom for Dancers. The argument is simple and uncomfortable. Street dance styles, locking, popping, breaking, hip-hop freestyle, house, waacking, vogue, are taught in studios on every continent, judged at paid competitions, used by choreographers for paying clients, and the people who created and innovated those styles mostly receive nothing from any of it. He has written elsewhere on the site that street dance has no union and that he has been “on this mission since 1990.”

The proposal is a voluntary monthly payment, per student, from anyone who teaches a style commercially. As published: $5 per student per month to the style’s designated creator (Boogaloo Sam for Fresno boogaloo and popping; the family of Don Campbell for locking; Danielle Polanco for heels; Jeff Selby for New Style Hustle); $3 per student per month to designated innovators (the Electric Boogaloos; the living Lockers; the Rock Steady Crew; Elite Force; Dance Fusion, Ejoe Wilson and Green himself for house; Viktor Manoel, Billy Goodson, Shabba-Doo and Ana Sanchez for waacking); and $1 per student per month to the resident teacher who keeps a style alive locally. Choreographers and judges would add something over $5 per job. For a style with a living creator, that is $9 per student per month. When a creator has died, the payment goes to children, then parents, then stops.

Three qualifications are essential. First, these are proposed payments, not royalties, not law, and not an operating program; the page says it would be sent to studios by the end of April 2023 and names no participating school, and DMM found no evidence of payments made. Second, the classifications are Green’s framework: who counts as creator or innovator of a collectively made dance is exactly the kind of question that has started feuds for fifty years, and the page does not say how disputes would be settled. Third, Green names himself as an innovator recipient in house, hip-hop freestyle and fusion, which a reader is entitled to weigh. He does not hide it.

Readers should also know what the law actually does. United States copyright protects choreographic works that are fixed and original, but the Copyright Office is explicit that social dance steps, simple routines and the basic building blocks of a dance are not protected. A dancer can own a filmed routine. Nobody owns the jack, the skate, the heel-toe or the waack. That is why Green’s model is moral rather than legal, and why he frames it as a commitment rather than a contract: the law offers street dance creators almost nothing, so he is asking the people who profit to offer something themselves.

Is it practical? A studio with a hundred street-dance students paying $9 a month per style would be sending $900 a month, $10,800 a year, out of a tuition base that in most American studios is already thin. Multi-style programs would multiply that. Collective innovations, the ones with no single creator, do not fit the model well. Those are serious objections, and DMM raises them because the proposal deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed. What the proposal does, regardless of whether a single studio adopts it, is state the ledger out loud: a lineage of mostly Black and Latino dancers built forms that now support a global teaching economy, and almost none of the money reaches them. Dance Mogul Magazine has spent sixteen years making the same argument from the other direction, by documenting who did what. Green is making it in dollars.

The Person Behind the Accomplishments

Green talks about faith without being asked and about competition only when pushed. In 2010 he described God as life itself, dance as his life’s expression and Jesus as the example, and he signs his House Dance Conference history with three Bible verses. He has also been unusually candid about what the battle culture did to him. He loved dance for its own sake as a kid, he said; entering battles exposed him to anger, showing off and violence, and those things fuelled his skill while, in his words, corrupting his mind through his late teens and twenties. He read the Bible on tours to check himself. His conclusion was not that ego, competition and aggression should be banished from dance, but that they are human, and that once they have done their work a dancer should return to the love that started it.

He stretches every day, at least an hour before he goes out to dance, and says his training has become more disciplined with age, not less. Asked how age affects dancing, his whole answer was: “It doesn’t.” On the DanceSpeak podcast in 2021 and again in an episode recorded in August 2025 and released in February 2026, the subjects were musicality, lineage, the difference between a competition and a convention, what he calls “auto-tuned” movement, the dance economy, race and representation in dance spaces, and the difference between moving and being a dancer. The 2026 episode runs an hour and nineteen minutes. He has not run out of things to say.

The Legacy Beyond the Individual

Set the pieces side by side and the shape is clear. Green did not create house dance; he developed a footwork within it that other dancers named. He did not create the House Dance Conference alone; he co-founded it with Dance Fusion and Ron Paisley and then carried it, financially and publicly, for more than a decade. He did not create waacking; he taught it, went quiet to learn it properly, and brought its pioneers to New York so a new generation could learn from them instead of from him. He won an award in Hollywood for putting the underground on screen, and he spent the next twenty-five years in studios and festivals explaining where that underground came from. Then he wrote down what he thinks it should cost.

Every one of those contributions is shared with someone. That is not a weakness of the record. It is the record. The lesson of this life, for the young dancer who knows the steps but not the people, is that a legacy in a community art form is measured by how much you passed through, not how much you kept.

The Credit Record, Kept Honest

DMM separates credits that independent reporting or scholarship confirms, credits that come from Green’s own bios and resume, and roles that belong to a group he was part of.

Attributed means Green or an institution he supplied a bio to says it; DMM has not found an independent record. Nothing in this table is disputed by any source we opened.

Watch: Brian Footwork Green on Film

In arc order: the underground profile, the earliest footage, the award-winning video, the conference, World Soul, the waacking generation, the judging seat and the classroom. YouTube cannot be opened from DMM’s production environment, so every embed is listed here from a traceable page and is checked by hand in the WordPress preview before publishing.

The Teaching & Travels Tracker

Every dated, located listing DMM could source, newest first. It is a floor, not a count: Green’s own resume lists dozens of schools and studios without dates, and most workshops of the 1990s and 2000s were never posted online.

Documented listings per year · bars drawn to scale

Years with at least one dated, sourced listing. 2014 is the best-documented year because his Asia tour, a Russian judging seat, the Bay Area conference and the online launch all left public traces.

The Teaching Tree: How Club Knowledge Became a Living

Nobody paid Green to learn Damien’s skate or Spanky’s isolations. The economy came later, and it came through teaching. The pattern below is the one his career traces, and it is the pattern DMM sees in nearly every house pioneer we document.

The Lineage

Names drawn from Green’s own interviews and bios, the Nordic Journal of Dance, Peridance faculty pages and Princess Lockerooo’s published accounts. Damien, Mike, Spanky and Story are given as Green names them; DMM has not documented their full names.

Worldwide Impact

Uncountable: the students in rooms that never posted a flyer, and every dancer who learned the Brian Turn without knowing whose it was.

By the Numbers: The Economy Around Brian Footwork Green’s Art

DMM shows the money in tiers so that no figure pretends to be something it is not.

Tier 1 · The project he worked on

These describe the record and the ceremony, not Green’s share. A choreographer’s fee on a music video is a one-time payment and is not published.

Personal pay points

Green has never published what he was paid for “Free,” a workshop or a judging seat, and DMM does not estimate it. His only published prices are his own online classes: $25 to $40 per class at They Barely Understand Hello, listed in 2026.

One-class scenario · hypothetical

His proposal, in numbers · hypothetical

Bars drawn to scale: $5 : $3 : $1. Proposed, voluntary, unenforced.

Tier 2 · The industries this art form feeds

Markets where house dance works · bars drawn to scale

Context only. These are whole industries, not the value of house dance or of any one dancer. Bar widths: 35.1 = 100%; 31.7 = 90.3%; 15.1 = 43.0%; 5.0 = 14.2%.

Tier 4 · What DMM does not know

Green’s personal earnings, his lifetime student count, the House Dance Conference’s budgets and the economic footprint of the dancers he trained are unpublished. DMM does not estimate them, and neither should anyone else.

How House Dance Traveled, and What Belongs to Everyone

House dance left New York through many doors at once. Ejoe Wilson, Voodoo Ray and Sekou Heru started the first house classes in 1988 at Fazil’s. Dance Fusion and World Soul gave it companies. Brooklyn Terry and Elite Force carried it with hip-hop. Marjory Smarth, Caleaf Sellers, Shan S, Tone McGregor and Kim Holmes taught it on five continents. Festivals in France, the Netherlands, Italy, the Czech Republic and Japan gave it battles, and Chicago never stopped reminding everyone where the music came from. The Check Your Body at the Door project filmed the 1990s so the dancing itself would survive.

Green’s share of that is specific: a footwork with his name on it, a conference that became a model, a waacking generation that found its elders, and a classroom that reached Vienna by 2002 and Milan in 2025. What is not his alone, and what this feature refuses to assign him, is house dance itself, the House Dance Conference as a sole creation, the revival of waacking, or the international house scene. He would tell you the same. His website does.

Where Is Brian Footwork Green Now?

Teaching, mostly, and talking. His most recent dated engagement DMM could source is the November 18, 2025 open class at DanceHaus in Milan. His most recent long interview is DanceSpeak episode 222, recorded live in August 2025 and released February 9, 2026. His online school, They Barely Understand Hello, is active, with classes credited to his collaborators C Minor and Max Woo, and his YouTube channel promised dance critiques beginning in late 2024. The Economic Wisdom for Dancers page has carried its April 2023 target dates since they passed; whether the proposal has moved since is a question DMM would like to put to him directly. He has not yet given Dance Mogul Magazine an interview. The invitation is open.

A Living Legacy, and Why DMM Is Tracking It

There are three reasons to document a legacy while the artist is still working. Accuracy: the starting-age conflict, the Damien dates, the World Soul roster and the Brian Turn can all be settled by the one person who knows, if someone asks while he can answer. Access: a dancer reading this in Milan, Tokyo or Newark can still take his class, in a room or online, and learn the history from the source instead of from a secondhand video. Value: a documented record turns a contribution into professional standing. Every festival listing, every faculty page, every scholarly footnote is a line on a resume that studios and funders can read. DMM’s job is to put those lines in one place, with their sources, so the next person does not have to rebuild the research from scratch.

The DMM Archive Connection

Green has not been the subject of a DMM feature before this one, but he is already in the archive. DMM’s 2013 feature on Tyrone “The Bone” Proctor records Proctor judging the first waacking competition at Green’s House Dance Conference in 2007; the rebuilt Tyrone Proctor legacy page and the Ana “Lollipop” Sanchez feature carry the Los Angeles side of the waacking story. His House Dance Conference collaborators in Dance Fusion are covered in Caleaf Sellers, Sekou Heru and Tony McGregor; the conference’s guest list runs through Don Campbell, Shock-a-Lock, Buddha Stretch and Henry Link. Ejoe Wilson started the first house classes at the studio where Green later taught waacking. For the wider story, see House Dance: From Chicago to the World Stage and The American Social Dance Movement.

Career & Cultural Timeline

Why Brian Footwork Green’s Legacy Matters to Dance Mogul Magazine

Dance Mogul Magazine was founded in 2010 by a father and son from Newark who believed the people who carry a culture deserve to be documented before the culture forgets them. Green’s life is that belief with a dance attached. He learned from people whose full names history did not keep, and he has spent thirty years making sure the next names are kept: on his conference flyers, on his economic proposal, on his website’s list of who taught him what. Character before celebrity: he put ten years between learning waacking and teaching it widely. Contribution before attention: the award is one line in a resume that is mostly classrooms. People before popularity: his proposal pays the originators first and names himself only where the record puts him. That is the DMM standard, and he was living it before we wrote it down.

What Dance Would Be Missing Without Brian Footwork Green

What Future Generations Can Learn From Brian Footwork Green

1. Watch your mother dance. The most memorable moment of his career was not the award. Start with the people in your house.

2. Learn the names before you teach the moves. “I don’t know that style or the history that well” is the sentence that made him trustworthy to the waacking pioneers.

3. You never arrive. “The mistake we all make is when we think we have arrived.” He still stretches at least an hour before he goes out to dance.

4. Innovate inside the tradition, and say so. He calls himself a house innovator, not a creator, on his own website. Credit given is credit kept.

5. Build the room, not just the routine. World Soul and the House Dance Conference outlasted any single performance because they were designed to teach.

6. Treat it as a business, and know what the business does to you. His advice to choreographers is to be humble, versatile and businesslike; his warning is that ego and aggression will fuel you and then cost you. Return to the love.

7. Ask who gets paid. Whether or not a studio ever adopts his $9-a-month model, the question is now in writing. Keep asking it.

The Room Keeps Getting Bigger

A boy from Bayside watched his mother dance and decided to learn tap. Forty-some years later, a dancer in Milan is paying for three hours with him, a dancer in Tokyo is teaching a turn with his name on it, a company at the Guggenheim credits him with igniting a revival, and a scholar in Scandinavia has footnoted the classes at Fazil’s. He will tell you, correctly, that none of it was his alone. That is the point. Brian “Footwork” Green received more than he invented and passed on more than he kept, and the room he first walked into in 1983 has not stopped growing since.

Brian Footwork Green: Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Brian “Footwork” Green?

Brian Footwork Green is a New York house and hip-hop freestyle dancer, choreographer, teacher and organizer from Bayside, Queens, with family roots in Harlem. He came up in New York’s underground clubs from 1983–84, developed the fast footwork style that gave him his name, won the 2001 American Choreography Award for Mýa’s “Free,” co-founded the House Dance Conference in 1999, helped bring waacking back to New York in the early 2000s, and has taught across the U.S., Europe, Asia and Africa.

What is Brian Green known for in house dance?

A very fast, syncopated footwork style built from tap rhythm, hustle and salsa feet and the club dancers Damien, Mike, Spanky and Story; the House Dance Conference; and decades of teaching the history of house, hip-hop and funk styles. Peridance’s faculty bio calls him one of the major contributors to the spread of house hip-hop around the world since 1992.

Did Brian Green invent house footwork?

No, and he does not claim to. House dance grew from Chicago house music, New York’s loft and club culture and a generation of dancers; Green developed a recognizable footwork within that tradition and names Dance Fusion, Ejoe Wilson and himself as house innovators, not creators, on his own website.

What music video earned Brian Green an American Choreography Award?

Mýa’s “Free” (2000), directed by Dave Meyers. He received Outstanding Achievement in Music Video, Hip-Hop, at the seventh annual American Choreography Awards on October 14, 2001, at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood; Tina Landon received the same honor for Mýa’s “Case of the Ex.”

What was the House Dance Conference?

An education-first house dance event that began in New York in August 1999, fuelled by Dance Fusion, Ron Paisley and Brian Green, who became its talent coordinator and financier. It brought pioneers of house, hip-hop, locking, popping, vogue and waacking to teach, perform and judge, ran about a decade in New York and later travelled to the Bay Area, France and Detroit.

What role did Brian Green play in the revival of waacking?

He taught waacking inside his house classes at Fazil’s in the early 2000s, invited Los Angeles pioneer Ana “Lollipop” Sanchez to judge the House Dance Conference in 2003 and collaborated with her through 2007, and was Princess Lockerooo’s first waacking teacher, introducing her to Tyrone Proctor. He did not create the dance, which belongs to 1970s Los Angeles, and he credits its pioneers first.

What is the Brian Turn?

According to Green’s own website, a move that dancers in Japan isolated from his hip-hop freestyle and named after him, “unknown to Brian,” and which is now taught across Asia under that name. DMM has found no independent documentation; the account is his.

What is Economic Wisdom for Dancers?

A voluntary payment proposal published on Green’s website: $5 per student per month to a street dance style’s creator, $3 to designated innovators and $1 to the local resident teacher, paid by studios, workshops, judges and choreographers who profit from teaching the style. It is a proposal, not a royalty system or law, and no participating studios are listed.

Sources & Further Viewing

© 2026 Dance Mogul Magazine LLC · The Legacy Series · A Black-owned dance and empowerment publication since 2010