Ten dancers who took locking, popping, breaking, and house from sidewalks and club floors to the center of global culture.

Between the early 1970s and the late 1990s, dancers with no studios, no funding, and no permission invented an entire movement language. In Los Angeles, Don Campbell froze mid-step and called it the lock. In Fresno, a teenager named Sam Solomon hit his muscles to the beat and called it the boogaloo. In the Bronx, kids dropped to the floor during the percussion breaks that DJs looped at block parties, and b-boying was born. By the time house music filled New York clubs in the late 1980s, street dance had become the visual signature of hip-hop culture: its battles, its crews, its whole grammar of style.

The ten figures here were chosen for influence rather than fame. Some became movie stars; others are known mainly to the dancers who still study their footwork frame by frame. Together they cover both coasts and every core style: locking, popping, breaking, hip-hop freestyle, and house. A few, like Marjory Smarth and Buddha Stretch, may be discoveries even for readers who know their hip-hop history. They appear in no particular order, because street dance has never respected rankings, only rounds.

1. Don “Campbellock” Campbell

The father of locking

Don Campbell (1951-2020) invented locking almost by accident: struggling to master the Funky Chicken at a Los Angeles campus hangout, he froze between steps, and the crowd loved the freeze more than the step. He turned the mistake into a style, joined Soul Train as a featured dancer in 1971, and left in 1973 after demanding fair pay for the show’s dancers. The crew he then built performed with Frank Sinatra and on Saturday Night Live. Start with any clip of Campbell locking on Soul Train: the joy is the technique.

2. Toni Basil

Street dance’s great connector

Most people know Toni Basil (born 1943) for the 1982 hit “Mickey,” and few realize she co-founded The Lockers with Don Campbell in 1971, managing the crew and staging its shows. A trained choreographer who believed street styles belonged beside ballet, she booked lockers into Carnegie Hall, Radio City Music Hall, and network television a decade before breaking hit the movies. She gave street dance its first bridge into the entertainment industry without asking it to change. Start with The Lockers’ 1970s television appearances, where her staging lets each dancer detonate in turn.

3. Boogaloo Sam

The architect of popping

Popping did not come from New York or Los Angeles. It came from Fresno, where Sam Solomon developed a technique of contracting his muscles on the beat and rolling his body through the fluid style he called boogaloo. The crew he founded in the late 1970s, the Electric Boogaloos, included his brother Timothy “Popin’ Pete” Solomon and brought the style to Soul Train in 1979, where Don Cornelius introduced America to “popping or boogaloo.” Nearly every robotic hit in every music video since owes him a debt. Start with that Soul Train debut.

4. Michael “Boogaloo Shrimp” Chambers

Popping’s screen ambassador

If popping conquered the world in the mid-1980s, Michael Chambers (born 1967) was its invasion force. As Turbo in Breakin’ (1984) and Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, he showed millions of viewers what animation-style popping could look like, and dancers from Paris to Seoul learned by rewinding his scenes on VHS. He had already appeared in the videos for Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long” and Chaka Khan’s “I Feel for You.” Start with the famous broom routine in Breakin’, where he makes a household object float like a dance partner.

5. Richard “Crazy Legs” Colón

Rock Steady’s president

A Bronx-born b-boy who joined the Rock Steady Crew in 1979, two years after its 1977 founding in the Bronx, and later became its president, Crazy Legs (born 1966) carried breaking from park jams to the world stage. He is credited with the move known as the W, danced in Wild Style and Beat Street, and even spun in a wig as Jennifer Beals’s double for the audition finale of Flashdance. When Rock Steady battled the Dynamic Rockers at Lincoln Center in 1981, the press coverage announced breaking to the mainstream. Start with his rounds in Beat Street’s Roxy battle.

6. Ken Swift

The epitome of a b-boy

Kenneth Gabbert (born 1966) started breaking at twelve after watching dancers on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, joined the Rock Steady Crew in 1980, and became the dancer other dancers call “the epitome of a b-boy.” Where power moves grabbed headlines, Ken Swift built breaking’s grammar: footwork patterns, freezes, and much of the terminology b-boys and b-girls still use. He appeared in Flashdance, Style Wars, and Beat Street, then spent the following decades teaching the foundation, eventually as a professor of dance studies at UCLA. Start with his footwork in Style Wars.

7. Buddha Stretch

New school’s first professor

When rap’s beat changed around 1990, the dancing changed with it, and Brooklyn’s Emilio “Buddha Stretch” Austin Jr. became the style’s chief codifier. With the crews Mop Top and Elite Force, he pioneered hip-hop freestyle, a party-rooted vocabulary that bridged the old school funk styles and the new school bounce. He drilled Michael Jackson in those steps for the “Remember the Time” era and choreographed for Will Smith and Mariah Carey, earning MTV award nominations. Start with Elite Force’s video work from the early 1990s and watch how relaxed mastery looks.

8. Marjory Smarth

The spirit of house dance

Born in Haiti and raised in New York, Marjory Smarth (died 2015) became one of house dance’s defining figures as the style crystallized on late 1980s and 1990s club floors. She folded Haitian dance, street styles, and club improvisation into a flowing, grounded language that treated the dance floor as communion rather than competition, and she carried it to students around the world. Dancers on several continents trace their house foundation directly to her classes. Start with her freestyle footage from the documentary Check Your Body at the Door, a portrait of New York’s house underground.

9. Brian “Footwork” Green

House music’s traveling footwork

Formally trained in tap, jazz, and African dance before diving into New York’s club scene in the mid-1980s, Brian Green earned his nickname by making the feet the star of house dancing. From 1992 onward he became one of the style’s principal ambassadors, teaching across Europe, Asia, and Africa and choreographing for artists including Missy Elliott and Mya, whose video “Free” won him an American Choreography Award. He also helped revive global interest in waacking and punking. Start with any of his judged battles or classes online: the man narrates history with his feet.

10. Ana “Rokafella” García

B-girl standard-bearer

Coming up in New York’s 1990s cyphers, when breaking’s first media wave had crashed and the culture survived on dedication alone, Rokafella proved that b-girls belonged in every circle. With her husband, the veteran b-boy Kwikstep, she co-founded Full Circle Productions, New York’s nonprofit breaking theater company, and she later directed All the Ladies Say, a documentary giving b-girls the microphone at last. As a teacher at The New School and an international judge, she turned representation into infrastructure. Start with All the Ladies Say, then find her battle footage.

Final thoughts

What unites these ten is not a step but a stance: each treated a social dance, born at a party or on a corner, as an art form worth codifying, teaching, and defending. Between 1970 and 2000 they gave hip-hop its visible body, a set of styles precise enough to be studied and open enough to keep evolving. The proof of their work is everywhere now, from music video choreography to the Olympic stage, and every dancer who hits a beat cleanly is quoting one of them, knowingly or not.

Ten names cannot hold a culture. Adolfo “Shabba Doo” Quiñones, the Lockers member who became Ozone in the Breakin’ films, nearly made this list, as did Timothy “Popin’ Pete” Solomon, who carried his brother’s Fresno invention into Michael Jackson’s orbit and classrooms worldwide. Consider them the eleventh and twelfth chairs. If this era moves you, keep exploring how street and social traditions shape the arts across CreARTivity, from pop culture to community heritage.

Corrected on 2 October 2026. An earlier version of this article said that Crazy Legs joined the Rock Steady Crew soon after its 1979 founding. The correct information is that the crew was founded in the Bronx in 1977 and that Crazy Legs joined in 1979.

Sources consulted

Wikipedia, Rock Steady Crew