Moving to the Beat of a Midlife Funk
4 Men Pop, Lock And Forge a Bond in Hip-Hop

By Dan Morse
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 26, 2006

Lots of middle-aged white guys would love to become hip-hop dancers.

Few actually try. Meet four who have.

On a recent Friday night, they take the stage at Jammin' Java in Vienna. They wear sunglasses, white shirts, dark ties, dark pants and sneakers. A funky beat pumps out of the speakers. Three suddenly cross their arms tightly, gangsta-style.

From the crowd, a light and confused laughter rises. Many of the approximately 110 people in the crowd had come to see something else, a rock band set to begin in 10 minutes. The dancers in front of them start to move -- decidedly jerky but surprisingly synchronized. "I like it!" someone yells.

None of the dancers envisioned performing like this more than a year ago, when they started private hip-hop lessons.

Not Mike Temchine, 29, a photographer who had wanted to quit because of stage fright and tensions with another dancer. Not Joseph Schilling, 43, a landscaper and musician saddled with what he calls a "Euro-puritanical influence that seeps into our ability to function." Not John Killoran, 54, a slender carpenter who almost died after being stabbed five times while walking through central Washington.

And not Stuart Chandler, 45, a nursery yard worker who is the group's best dancer. Pre-hip-hop, he was, his wife said, spending evenings moping around their house in Cabin John, near Bethesda. She urged him to go dance and make new friends.

"He is our Beyonce," Schilling said, referring to hip-hop diva Beyonce Knowles. "He's our ultimate prototype."

First, there were just two.

One was Schilling, who for years had been performing music in local clubs, mixing elements of rock, folk and hip-hop. More recently, a girlfriend had taught him some dance moves. She later left him, but the good feelings of learning dance remained. He moaned about all of it to his friend Killoran, who for his part simply hated that he couldn't dance.

The two tried adult lessons in Dupont Circle and soon discovered that "adult" meant a roomful of young women. Schilling felt as if everyone was sizing him up as a lech. They were constantly several steps behind.

Schilling and Killoran headed to a different studio, finding a private teacher at DC Dance Collective in the District. "Oh, my God," the teacher, Phil Thorne, recalled thinking after seeing Schilling dance. "This guy sucks."

But they certainly had drive, and Thorne agreed to give them hourly sessions once a week. The two guys had to round up friends to beef up the size of the class and help pay the fees.

Temchine was a fairly easy recruit -- the freelancer (who has done work for The Washington Post) had been belly-dancing for nearly two years.

Chandler took work.

He didn't leave the house much, other than to work at American Plant Food, a Bethesda nursery, where he hauled shrubbery and trees. In the evenings, while his wife worked at the small bar she owned, Chandler cooked dinner and helped their daughter with her homework.

When he did go outside, he liked to look at nature or pick up bottle caps, scraps of paper and shards of bicycle reflectors. He then glued them and other objects onto the folk art-style canvas paintings and birdhouses he created in his basement.

Schilling leaned on Chandler's wife, telling her to take Chandler to "Napoleon Dynamite," a movie that celebrates a high school nerd who shocks classmates by learning hip-hop dance. The couple loved the movie.

And Chandler's wife, well-known local singer-songwriter Alice Despard, told her husband it would be good for him to take hip-hop lessons because he could make and strengthen friendships. "You need a male-bonding situation here," she said.

And so he bonded, embarking on the journey that would test all four.

Hip-hop demands isolated movement of various body parts. Youngsters who grow up watching hip-hop videos and practicing moves pick it up more easily. To the middle-aged, it can be a foreign body language -- even to accomplished dancers such as Jane Ford, 45, owner of K2 Dance Studio in Beltsville, who has done the Lindy across floors at the White House and Kennedy Center.

Five years ago, she and several other swing instructors of about the same age decided to learn hip-hop dancing for fun. They knew what to do: Hire a hotshot teacher from San Francisco.

"We fly him in for privates every summer so we don't have to deal with those twenty-somethings," Ford said. In learning the moves, she said, race isn't a factor, but age and background can be: "Once, I brought a black friend, and he was as bad as the rest of us."

As the months went by, the four men learned as little as 15 seconds' worth of new moves during each 60-minute class. Their musical scores featured 50 Cent and a Jay-Z tune that includes the lyrics: "Y'all don't want me to spray the semi' in here. I mean, if you a fan, I consider you fam.' "

The best dancer was the soft-spoken Chandler, owing to his days jumping around to rock music in the 1980s. Around the house, he tinkered with moves -- spinning while cooking dinner or "popping" his arms while walking through his sunny living room.

"My dad does hip-hop," his 12-year-old daughter, Gwen, told classmates at Thomas W. Pyle Middle School in Bethesda. She remembers them asking her whether he made a lot of money. She said no. "Then I think they went back to ignoring me," Gwen said.

For his part, Killoran was thankful to just be alive.

Shortly before midnight Nov. 28, 2004, as he walked near Dupont Circle, two men stole his wallet and stabbed him five times in the chest and back. He spent nearly two weeks in the hospital and didn't return to dance lessons for three months.

Over time, Schilling, the landscaper and musician, thought performances would lend focus to the group and had started to see stage value in their act. Two things could happen: They'd remain goofy-looking, middle-aged guys dancing goofily, or they'd become goofy-looking, middle-aged guys dancing surprisingly decently. Either would be hysterical. He started booking them to perform at his own gigs, where he plays his eclectic music under the name Fire-Dean.

As a tuneup to one show, the four performed early one weeknight in mid-January at Grog and Tankard, a no-frills joint in Glover Park. In the crowd: four of their friends, the bartender, a guy sitting at the bar wearing a knit winter hat and the next act, a self-described jazz/hip-hop/rhythm and blues group called JOYTI (Joy. On. Your. Total. Interest.).

JOYTI is composed of three African American men who have been playing in Washington for some time. As the dancers broke into their routine, JOYTI violinist Charles Tolbert took a seat, admiring their unique marketability. "They will probably make it before we will," he said.

That very notion -- pushing the act into public view -- was especially troubling to one of the four members. From the beginning, Temchine thought they would be confined to dance class or a release party for a music video Schilling was making. Temchine wasn't even sure what they did qualified as hip-hop, preferring the term "interpretive hip-hop" instead. Doing it on stage seemed embarrassing.

"You don't think I get nervous?" Schilling asked Temchine before a performance, his tone of empathy hitting home and helping break tensions that had grown between them. "As long as I have been performing, I get just as nervous now as when I first started."

That helped put the photographer at ease enough to continue with the group.

At the Feb. 10 Jammin' Java show in Vienna, he busted out several old belly-dance moves during his solo.

In the crowd, people cheered, laughed, uncorked catcalls. Celia Grammes, 26, who had come to hear the rock band, bolted up from her chair and danced as she does at D.C. clubs. Then she fell back into her chair, rolling her head back in laughter.

Chandler's wife, Despard, the woman who had pushed him to go make new friends, was there. On stage, Chandler broke out a solo, pantomiming that he was removing a cell phone from his shirt pocket, flipping it open and taking a call. A woman behind Despard told Despard to move so she could see. Despard did. She also filled her lungs with air and shouted.

"Beyonce!"