EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW  |  STREET DANCE  |  WHERE ARE THEY NOW

Storyboard P: The Mutation Artist Who Danced With Erykah Badu, Broke the Laws of Movement, and Found His Voice

From a Jay-Z video shot in one improvised take to The Tonight Show with Erykah Badu — and now a 2026 recording career shaped by Drake, resilience, and a bond with Badu that outlasted the spotlight.

By Dance Mogul Magazine  |  Originally published December 2017  |  Updated and expanded 2026

Storyboard P — Flex Dancer, Mutation Artist, Visual Recording Artist | Photo: Dance Mogul Magazine Archives

Fresh off his feature in Jay-Z's "4:44" video, Storyboard P sat down with Dance Mogul Magazine in December 2017 to talk about his latest collaboration — a creative partnership with one of the most organically gifted artists in music, Erykah Badu. It was a fitting pairing. Storyboard P had spent over a decade blazing a trail as a visual and movement artist, refusing to compromise his process even in years when few people outside Brooklyn were watching. By the time Badu came calling, the work had already spoken for itself.

Nearly a decade later, that interview reads less like a snapshot and more like a prologue. The dancer once described by The New Yorker as "the Basquiat of street dancing" has since become something the industry rarely allows its dancers to be: a full creative force, moving fluidly between choreography, visual art, and — as of 2026 — his own recorded music. Dance Mogul Magazine is revisiting his story because it captures something essential about how movement artists build careers that outlast a single viral moment, and because his 2026 chapter proves the point better than anyone could have predicted in 2017.

The 2017 Interview: Working With Erykah Badu

Storyboard P has been blazing a trail as a visual and movement artist for over a decade, so seeing a major artist like Erykah Badu seek him out wasn't a surprise to those who had followed his work closely. It was proof of a principle he has repeated throughout his career: you cannot skip your own process, and you have to put in the work even when you think no one is watching. Someone is always watching. He took time over the holiday season in 2017 to give Dance Mogul Magazine the behind-the-scenes story of the collaboration.

Dance Mogul: So, let's jump right into it, P. What was it like working with Erykah Badu?

Storyboard P: It was great, she is just a great person in general. She really took care of me as an artist. You know, as a dancer we are always disrespected and given the crumbs of the industry, but she didn't treat me that way — she treated me like an artist, like I was on her level. That is something I won't ever forget. It shows me how I'm supposed to be treated, and I won't settle for anything less.

Dance Mogul: Recently you two performed together on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. What was that experience like, because you were building up chemistry and momentum on Instagram, and it seemed to work out perfectly in the performance.

Storyboard P: Me and Erykah vibe on the same frequency, so it was all love and good vibes, and that is what it takes to create a genuine collaboration on and off stage.

Dance Mogul: Will there be future collaborations?

Storyboard P: Yes, I don't want to say too much, but yes. Let's just say it's a fusion project where I get to create how I want. As dancers, you get told what to do and when to do it a lot of times, but I'm beyond that. I'm a visual artist that can bring to life other artists' music. It also can serve as my debut musically. Very few know that I got bars to go along with these glides. So I'm looking forward to what the future has in store for me. I remain grateful through it all as I patiently keep waiting.

Storyboard P and Erykah Badu — The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon (2017)

The Dancer Who Invented His Own Genre

Storyboard P was born Saalim Muslim and grew up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where he studied dance at the Harlem School of the Arts. He came up through flex — a Brooklyn-born street dance style built on pantomime, physical contortion, and bone-breaking illusion — but he didn't stop at mastering an existing form. He built his own. He calls it "mutation," a style that draws on stop-motion animation, using fractured, tightly controlled movements to simulate motion that seems physically impossible: levitation, walking backward while appearing to move forward, limbs that seem to glitch between frames like a figure caught in a zoetrope. His stage name is a direct reference to that inspiration — "Storyboard" for the frame-by-frame language of animation, "P" carried over from an earlier stage name, Professoar.

His breakout mainstream moment came in 2012 with Flying Lotus's short film Until the Quiet Comes, directed by Kahlil Joseph, which won the Special Jury Award for Short Film at the Sundance Film Festival. Okayplayer identified that project as the moment Storyboard P "hit the mainstream." From there, his reach only widened: he was selected to improvise a solo dance sequence for Jay-Z's 2013 video "Picasso Baby" — dancing to the track for the first time as the cameras rolled, with no rehearsal and no advance listen — and he later appeared in Arthur Jafa and Elissa Blount-Moorhead's visually ambitious film for Jay-Z's "4:44" in 2017, the same feature that opens this story. By that point, YouTube videos featuring his dancing had reached roughly 500 million views. He also performed in a national commercial for the Apple Watch, and his work has been the subject of feature coverage in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and a cover story in The Wire.

In 2015, the Bessie Awards — New York's most prestigious dance honors — recognized Storyboard P with the Outstanding Emerging Choreographer Award, an institutional acknowledgment of what audiences had already sensed watching his videos: this was choreography, not just improvisation, even when it looked entirely spontaneous. He has performed at Breakin' Convention at Sadler's Wells Theatre in London, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Ithaca College, and Performance Space New York, carrying flex and mutation from Brooklyn sidewalks into some of the most respected stages and institutions in the world.

Where Is Storyboard P Now? Inside His 2026 Chapter

The bond formed with Erykah Badu on the Fallon stage in 2017 turned out to run far deeper than a single collaboration. According to recent reporting, Badu took Storyboard P under her wing when he became severely ill during the pandemic — a period of real hardship that, by his own account, helped spark the next chapter of his career. That kind of support, coming from an artist he had already described as treating him "like I was on her level," speaks to exactly the mutual respect he told Dance Mogul Magazine he would never settle for less than.

Storyboard P's movement language has since reached an entirely new generation of listeners. In 2026, his choreography and visual presence appeared in Drake's "High Fives" and "Little Birdie" music videos, both part of Drake's ICEMAN album era — work that surfaced as part of what has been described as his "Iceman episode 4," released to Drake's YouTube channel in May 2026. Over the years his creative footprint has also crossed paths with Alicia Keys, Beyoncé, and Usher, and he has picked up recognition from institutions ranging from MTV to Harvard.

But the most significant development in his 2026 story is one nobody would have predicted from the 2017 interview above — except, perhaps, Storyboard P himself, who told Dance Mogul Magazine back then: "Very few know that I got bars to go along with these glides." In June 2026, he released his debut single as a recording artist, "I Be A Fool," the first installment of a planned four-disc studio album project. By his own account, he wrote and recorded the track in roughly half an hour. The song is soulful and unhurried, built around a narrator asking for conversation and emotional intimacy rather than anything physical — a deliberate inversion for an artist whose career has been built entirely on the body.

The music video for "I Be A Fool" is its own act of reinvention. It reuses footage shot in a Newark warehouse in 2010 — one of Storyboard P's earliest breakthrough visual pieces, filmed years before the mainstream world caught up to his artistry — now re-edited to match the tone of the new song. In interviews tied to the release, he's been direct about why the pivot matters to him: "Being objectified as a Dancer, I knew that my therapy would be me expressing my storytelling abilities beyond my body, but with my pen and my notepad." He has also been candid about the economics behind the decision, noting that dancers are frequently left out of the creative process and denied ownership over what they help create: "You're just seen as jewelry for music artists, respectfully."

Nine years after telling Dance Mogul Magazine he "remained grateful through it all" while "patiently waiting," Storyboard P is no longer waiting. He is releasing music, expanding into writing and design, and doing it on his own terms — the same terms he described in 2017 when he said Erykah Badu treated him like an artist "on her level." That standard, once set by a mentor, has become the standard he now holds for his own career.

Why Storyboard P's Story Matters to Dance Mogul Magazine

Dance Mogul Magazine exists to inspire self-empowerment and preserve the legacy of artists across every dance style and culture — and Storyboard P's arc is one of the clearest examples of why that mission matters. In 2017, he told this publication directly that dancers are too often "disrespected and given the crumbs of the industry." That is precisely the pattern Dance Mogul Magazine was founded to interrupt: giving dancers the same platform, respect, and editorial depth typically reserved for musicians and actors.

His journey from Brooklyn sidewalks and Instagram freestyles to Jay-Z videos, a Bessie Award, Drake's ICEMAN album, and now his own recorded music is a direct rebuttal to the idea that street dance is a stepping stone rather than a destination. Storyboard P didn't leave dance behind to become a musician — he expanded outward from it, the same way hip-hop and street dance pioneers have always expanded outward into film, fashion, and sound. Documenting that trajectory — from a first exclusive interview through nearly a decade of evolution — is exactly the kind of legacy preservation Dance Mogul Magazine was built to do.

It also matters because his story models something for the next generation of dancers reading this: ownership. Storyboard P's decision to step behind the pen, to build a four-disc album project, and to speak openly about not wanting to be "jewelry for music artists" is a direct lesson in creative self-determination — the same self-empowerment ethos this publication was built around.

The Story Continues

Storyboard P's 2017 interview with Dance Mogul Magazine captured an artist at a turning point — recognized by one of music's most respected voices, teasing a future that included his own music without yet naming it. Nearly a decade later, that future has arrived. He has danced through illness, through a pandemic, through the ongoing struggle to be seen as more than a body for hire, and come out the other side with a debut single, a Drake collaboration, and a four-disc album on the way.

Dance Mogul Magazine will keep telling this story as it unfolds — because Storyboard P's evolution from flex prodigy to mutation innovator to recording artist is exactly the kind of full-circle legacy this publication exists to document. Someone was always watching. Now they're listening, too.

Storyboard P Erykah Badu Flex Dance Mutation Jay-Z Drake Street Dance Bessie Awards I Be A Fool Where Are They Now

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