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NJPAC’s 2024 Kwanzaa Festival: The Year Jersey Club Was Taught as Heritage

Newark’s anchor cultural institution handed its Kwanzaa dance programming to a Jersey Club historian. Anthony “Solo” Harris used it to put the art form’s past, present, and future on one stage.

By Dance Mogul Magazine | Originally published December 26, 2024 | Updated and expanded September 2026

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Anthony “Solo” Harris — Jersey Club dancer, educator, and historian, who curated the festival’s Jersey Club programming.

A Festival That Set a New Standard

This year’s NJPAC Kwanzaa Festival was nothing short of revolutionary, setting a new standard for cultural celebration and community empowerment. The Jersey Club energy was spearheaded by Anthony “Solo” Harris, and the festival showcased the vibrant spirit of Jersey Club dancing — highlighting its roots, its present-day innovators, and its future stars. Partnering with Team E.V.O and SharkLyfe Nation, Harris curated a display of talent, history, and vision that left audiences inspired and invigorated.

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The Showcase: Past, Present, Future

The Jersey Club showcase was the crown jewel of the festival. From the moment the music dropped, the audience was transported through time — paying homage to the dance’s history with performances by pioneers, including Major of the iconic Brick City Dancers. Major’s appearance was a triumphant moment, embodying the perseverance, artistry, and culture that have defined Jersey Club for decades.

In a seamless transition to the present, Harris and his team spotlighted the artistry of today’s dancers. Team E.V.O and SharkLyfe Nation brought electrifying energy, reminding everyone that Jersey Club is more than a dance style — it’s a movement. The choreography was a blend of precision and improvisation, carrying the heartbeat of New Jersey’s streets and the global influence of this culture.

Looking to the future, young performers took the stage with bold moves and fresh ideas, proving the next generation is ready to take Jersey Club to unprecedented heights. Their routines were a testament to Harris’s dedication to mentorship and his ability to unite the past, present, and future in one vision.

The festival also featured an appearance by Chuck Maldonado, one of the industry’s most renowned choreographers and directors. Maldonado’s presence underscored the event’s significance, bridging the gap between local talent and global recognition. His involvement, along with Major’s, added depth and star power, elevating the day from a local celebration to a cultural milestone. Maldonado’s own work is documented in our cover feature.

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What NJPAC Is — and Why the Building Matters

To understand why this event carried weight, you have to understand the room it happened in. The New Jersey Performing Arts Center sits at 1 Center Street in downtown Newark. It describes itself as the most diverse performing arts center in the country and the anchor cultural institution for both the city of Newark and the state of New Jersey. That is not marketing language so much as a job description. NJPAC is the building where the region decides what counts as art worth presenting.

For a homegrown Newark street form, getting inside that building is not a formality. Institutions like NJPAC are the mechanism by which a practice stops being “what the kids are doing” and becomes something a city says it is proud of. Presenting on that stage confers a status that no amount of viral reach substitutes for: it means the culture has been entered into the civic record.

Newark street dance had already made that claim once. According to our own reporting on the origins of the form, the Brick City Dancers — whose innovators included Major, alongside NyJohn, Mark, Faheem, and Shaheed, under the guidance of Basil Harris and Barbara Ramirez — were the first dance group with diverse styles of street dance to open their own show at NJPAC. They appeared on national television, shaped the scene around gathering spots like Skate 22 and Branch Brook Park, and, in the words of the dancers who came after them, were the first to show kids in Newark what a group working together could actually achieve.

That is the detail that turns a good festival into a closed circle. Read the fuller history in What Is Jersey Club? The Dancer Perspective.

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What the Kwanzaa Effort Represents

NJPAC’s Kwanzaa Family Festival & Marketplace is not a one-off holiday booking. It is an Arts Center tradition running more than twenty-five years, produced by NJPAC’s Community Engagement team, free to attend, and drawing thousands of families to downtown Newark. A typical year includes a candle-lighting ceremony, vibunzi, dance classes open to all abilities, arts and crafts, interactive storytelling, an artisan marketplace, and hourly performances by local dancers and musicians in the Prudential Hall lobby.

The organizing principle is the part that matters here. Kwanzaa was created in 1966 by activist and author Maulana Karenga to give people of African heritage a holiday centered on their own culture. It runs seven days, each dedicated to one of seven principles known collectively as the Nguzo Saba. At NJPAC, each activity on the festival schedule is built to embody one of those principles. The programming is a curriculum, not a lineup.

Now look at what Harris actually built against that list. A showcase that put pioneers, working professionals, and children on the same floor is Umoja and Ujima — unity, and collective work carried as a responsibility. Teaching a Newark-born form inside Newark’s flagship institution, under its own name, is Kujichagulia: a community defining and presenting itself rather than waiting to be defined. The choreography itself is Kuumba. The decision to structure the whole thing as transmission rather than entertainment is Nia.

The original version of this article observed that Harris’s vision exemplified the holiday’s values of creativity, purpose, and collective work. That was not a loose compliment. Those are three of the seven principles by name, and they are the three his programming was actually engineered around.

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What It Means That Solo Was Asked to Teach There

Historically, the dance component of NJPAC’s Kwanzaa festival has leaned on heritage companies — West African dance and drum ensembles, community dance schools, groups whose work is explicitly ancestral. That is the expected shape of Kwanzaa programming, and it is a good shape.

Handing a slot in that program to a Jersey Club practitioner is a different kind of statement. It places a form invented in Newark in the late 1990s and early 2000s in the same category as ancestral tradition. It says Jersey Club is not a trend the institution is indulging for the youth turnout; it is Black cultural heritage that happens to be recent, local, and still being made. For a genre that began life as Brick City Club — named after Newark itself — being taught as heritage in Newark’s own hall is about as complete a validation as the form can receive.

The second thing worth naming is the role he was given. Harris was not brought in as a performer. He was brought in to curate and to teach. Those are the functions institutions assign to people they consider authorities, and the distinction is the whole story. Our own coverage of his Jersey Club 101 Workshop describes him as a Jersey Club historian and a veteran of the legendary EnVy dance group — one of the two crews, alongside the Brick City Dancers, credited with cultivating the dance vocabulary itself. He is not explaining someone else’s culture. He is a primary source in it.

There is a further alignment worth flagging. NJPAC advertises dance classes for all abilities as part of this festival, and inclusive practice is territory Harris has already built a career in — documented in our feature on Solo Expression and Evolving Disabilities, on how he turned a purpose-driven dance business into something that widens the door rather than narrowing it. An institution looking for someone who can teach Jersey Club to a room containing every kind of body and every level of experience was choosing from a very short list.

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What It Means for the Next Generation

Jersey Club is having its mainstream moment. The sound has moved through records by Drake, Lil Uzi Vert, and Coi Leray; a Newark producer’s beat turned into one of the most inescapable songs of recent years; the dances have been absorbed into the churn of short-form video, where a step can reach millions of people in a week and arrive stripped of every trace of where it came from.

That is the actual risk facing the form, and it is not obscurity. It is the opposite. A style can go global and still lose its lineage, because virality transmits movement without transmitting memory. Kids learn the step from a phone, never learn the name of the crew that made it, and a generation later nobody in the city can say who built what.

The 2024 festival is a working model of the alternative. A child in that lobby saw Major move, saw Team E.V.O and SharkLyfe Nation move, and then got up and moved themselves — in a building their city calls its own, on a day organized around unity and purpose, taught by someone who could name the originators. That child now has something an algorithm cannot hand them: a place in a sequence. They know the Percolator and Rock Ya Hips came from somewhere, that the somewhere is here, and that the people who made it are still alive and were standing in the room.

Three concrete things the next generation gets out of a day structured like this one:

Provenance. Learning the vocabulary alongside the names attached to it means the credit stays with the community when the form travels. That is the difference between a culture that gets referenced and a culture that gets paid.

A visible ceiling worth aiming at. Seeing pioneers honored on a mainstage tells a young dancer that longevity in this art form is possible and that it ends in respect rather than obscurity. Very few young street dancers have ever been shown that.

A model of how to hand something over. Harris did not use the biggest platform of his year to center himself. He used it to seat an elder and to give children the floor. Any dancer who eventually inherits a room should study the choreography of that decision as carefully as the routines.

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Why It Matters to Dance Mogul Magazine

Dance Mogul Magazine has documented dance culture, history, and community since 2010, and this event sits at the exact intersection of the three. Our work has never been to cover dance once it is safely famous. It is to be in the room while the record is being made, and to write down who was there.

Jersey Club is a case study in why that matters. The music side of the story has been told reasonably well: the DJs, the Brick Bandits, the pressings sold out of car trunks in downtown Newark. The dance side — the crews who actually built the movement vocabulary that made the music make sense — has been documented far more thinly, and mostly by people inside it. That gap is precisely what our Archive and our Jersey Club coverage exist to close.

The festival also models what we mean by empowerment — not motivational language, but infrastructure. A free festival, in a city’s own institution, where a local expert is trusted to teach local children their own inheritance, is empowerment with a floor plan. And it is a reminder that the dance industry is not only agencies and tours; it is also the curator who decides which three generations share a stage.

We are proud to have covered our partners at NJPAC, Team E.V.O, and SharkLyfe Nation on this day, and prouder still that the dancers who built Jersey Club are being written into the record by people who know their names.

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The Movement Continues

The NJPAC 2024 Kwanzaa Festival will be remembered as a turning point for Jersey Club culture. Thanks to Anthony “Solo” Harris, Team E.V.O, SharkLyfe Nation, and the luminaries who graced the stage, the day showed the capacity of dance to unite, inspire, and transform communities.

But the reason to keep this article on the record is narrower and more useful than that. On one December afternoon in Newark, a form born in that city’s basements and block parties was taught as heritage, by one of its own historians, inside the state’s flagship arts institution, on a holiday built around self-determination and creativity — with the generation that invented it, the generation working in it, and the generation about to inherit it all in the same room.

That is not a performance credit. That is how a culture survives contact with the mainstream. Jersey Club’s past, present, and future have never shone brighter, and the world is watching as this movement continues to grow.

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