Mark Pickett sat on the low park wall, smoking. His sunglasses rested on his smooth brown face, his thick, dark locs held from his face with a red terry headband. Every Saturday he meets his group of dancers, the New York Transformerzz, here in the shadows of the fountain at the Columbus Circle entrance to Central Park. His dancers gather around him in red, white and blue nylon track suits like disciples, waiting for their cue.
Someone pushed an old, navy baby stroller filled with an amplifier, first aid kit, water bottles and jackets, to the plaza. That was the clue to get ready and the dancers filtered out. Pickett, in his mid-40’s stood up with a deep exhale, stretched his 6-foot-2-inch frame and ambled to the center of the plaza where he would hold court as Zone TDK, the master of ceremonies, dancer and father figure, for the better part of the afternoon.
It’s much easier to dance for money then it was 20 years ago when former mayor Rudy Guliani vowed to clean up the city streets. The Parks Department has no specific rule against dancing in the parks, as long as there are no advertisements attached to park property and the dancing is done on a hard surface, according to the Parks Department. But it is not uncommon for the dancers to receive summons from the New York Police Department for panhandling or disorderly conduct.
But Pickett and his crew have no fears.
“People left their blood on the street breakdancing,” said Jillian S., 24, also known as Ill Jill, she is one of the two female dancers with the group and one of the former Jose Mateo dancers. “People are trying to get the arts off the street, but we’re working to not let it happen and get more of the dance community behind us.”
The New York Transformerzz stepped onto the plaza and formed a huddle to pray. Pickett towered over the group, his locs shook like a shaman’s rain stick. Pickett, as Zone TDK, then broke away from the others and grabs a microphone lying on the ground.
“What time is it?” he asked the crowd and his dancers, his voice scratchy through the old amplifier.
“Showtime,” his dancers respond weakly. He tries again.
“What time is it?”
“Showtime!” they say it louder and clap to rally the crowd that had waited nearly 10 minutes for the show to begin.
The crowd was ready, but their energy was lacking. Professor Pop, who has been dancing with Pickett since the 80s, went around, the perimeter asking the crowd what was wrong with them, it was a free show. While trying to rouse them, a petite, red-haired woman from the Parks Department breaks through the wall of people demanding, “Who’s in charge here?”
Pickett meets her halfway across the impromptu stage that someone created with white medical tape stuck to the ground. The Parks Department rep shouted at Pickett, saying that there cannot be any show unless people move in closer. She repeated this over every word that he started to say, shaking her walkie-talkie at him before storming through the crowd again, her walkie-talkie bouncing on her hip with every angry footstep.
A new crowd has formed on the plaza at Columbus Circle. Children drag the adults they are with over to watch. It would be another five or 10 minutes before Pickett is ready to start the show.
“It takes seven minutes to get anyone to even want to give you a dollar,” he said. “So you have to impress them, wham them-bam them in seven minutes. If you wait any longer to do that, you risk making no money.”
The show starts off slow, with introductions of the group and some simple moves before each dancer has their turn to break out into their own freestyle. Polite applause turn to enraptured cheering with each flip and double-jointed twist of the legs.
“That was pretty sweet,” said Vinny DiCristo, 19, a student at the American Music and Dramatic Academy in New York, at the end of the show. “I wish I could dance like that. I can dance, but not like that.”
DiCristo’s friend Amanda Calabria, also 19, jumped into the performance and without a drop of shyness, danced with the Transformerzz although she did not know a single breakdancing move.
“Well, I’m also a dancer, so I’m brave,” Calabria said. “This is my first time seeing them but a lot of my friends where I’m from in Miami do this. It reminded me of them and I had to do it,” she said.
“That’s why I took my fencing scholarship and studied drama and the theater. I wanted to know how to put on a show, how to perform and keep people watching,” Pickett said afterwards.
Pickett has been dancing since 1973, but the arthritis in his knees tells him he has to give up soon. He started dancing as a child on Clay Avenue in the Bronx. No style, from breakdancing to ballet was off-limits to him.
“I was in a car accident when I was eight years old,” he said. “I spent the whole summer in a cast. When I was in the hospital, I said, ‘when I get out, I’m never gonna stop dancing’ and, that was it.”
Pickett said that things are not the same for dancers on the street now, as they were in the 80s, which is why he is fighting for breakdancing permits before he goes.
“It’s not just for us, it’s for the other breakdancers that are coming up behind us,” Pickett said. “It’s for the people that are like 11 and 12 years old now that are watching movies like “Step Up” and have some aspiration to perform, to breakdance.”
His career has been filled with accomplishment and heartache. He performed for President Ronald Reagan during his first inauguration at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, but he also been arrested 36 times for dancing, even when he had his permits. But he never stopped..He , trained at the Harkness Center for Dance and toured with 80s hip-hop groups like Kid-N-Play and Big Daddy Kane and other breakdancers such as Scoob and Scrap Lover and Turbo and Ozone- He attended Yale on a fencing scholarship.
All the members of the New York City Transformerzz are committed to the democracy of the dance.
“People think because you dance on the street you’re down and out, you’re ghetto, you’re hood,” he said. “But I handle my money well. I make more than minimum wage, more than teachers, more than police officers. I went to college. I’m not out here for me,” Pickett said. “I’m out here for the kids coming up after me, to make sure they can keep doing this.”
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