Written by Axel Massin.
When you first told your grand parents about your new longboard dancing hobby, the probability of them knowing what you were talking about was most likely as low as my wish to check the last continent (Antartica) off my list of places to skate coming true. A very long sentence just to say that longboard dancing is a very young sport. Longboard dancing is so young that if it was human it couldn’t legally order alcohol and could only recently start taking driving lessons. So, how to tell the story of a sport that is not in history books and does not even have a Wikipedia page? I raise this question to advise precaution when reading this article, because all the information I will be sharing came from videos, late night forum discussions, online articles and conversations with riders and members of this modest industry that I have been a part of for the last ten years. In other words, it is subjective, incomplete and approximative.
The birth of skateboarding.
Longboard dancing is a subdivision of longboard skate, so to understand its history, I think it is important to first take a look at skateboarding. Skateboarding is said to be born in the early 1950’s, with Californian and Hawaiian surfers looking for a feeling of glide on waveless days. If you have seen the historic movie Lords of Dogtown, you know that they were sort of outcasts, breaking in to people’s houses while they were out, to skate their empty pools - during periods of drought, water restrictions temporarily forbade filling up private swimming pools.
In the beginning, they were attaching rollerblade on a board, and step by step sparked the interest of a couple brands to put a bit more engineering into it, thus building the first skateboards. No bushings, no bearings, just a plank of wood with 4 wheels made out of metal and attached to the ancestor of a truck.
As skateboarding got more popular, people were cruising down the street, reproducing surfing manoeuvres in pools, and doing some steps on the boards. If nowadays some skateboarders think that longboard dancing is the illegitimate child of skateboarding that should have never been born, it turns out it is actually its great grand parent. I was astonished to discover that people were doing cross steps and pirouettes much before they were doing kickflips. As breaking in to somebody’s place to skate their empty pool isn’t the most convenient way to practice a hobby, they started to build ramps and bowls, while others took their boards to the streets and made the city their playgrounds. Since this article is not about skateboarding, and my knowledge of its history is quite limited, I won’t go into further detail, but I think it is worth mentioning the name of Rodney Mullen, one of the most talented and creative skaters of all times, who revolutionized the sport in the 80’s, invented countless tricks and inspired a wide range of skaters and longboard dancers.
The 90’s are probably the biggest turning point in history. The technology improved to a level getting close to what we are riding today. The differences of shapes got more pronounced to cover different uses: the current skateboard is born, light and highly manoeuvrable, longer boards with bigger wheels appear, meant for higher speeds and comfortable cruising. I am not sure of this information but I believe the first longboard brand to be Sector 9.
The unknown father of longboarding.
And now we come to the most uncertain part of our history because despite my many intents that might as well have gotten me a restraining order, I did not manage to enter in contact with the person who I believe to be the father of longboard dancing: Chris Chaput. To my knowledge, Chris was a professional skateboarder who started in the 70’s and practiced various types of skating throughout his long career. Since, as discussed before, people were doing steps back then, it would make sense that Chris picked them up at the moment.
This lead to what I believe to be the very first video of a cross steps made and 360 steps (back then called «foot spin») on a longboard.
What is striking about this video is that the cross step is no longer a straight step, like it is in surfing or was in the 70’s, but already a carving step with two steps to the heelside and two steps to the toeside. In other words, longboard dancing is born. At least on the internet, since it’s hard to know how long Chris had been cross stepping before publishing that video, and who else was doing it too. That video, that is still quite unknown to this day, had a gigantic snowball effect for our sport, because it is what Adam Colton and Adam Stokowski, who we all know to be the founders of longboard dancing, said inspired them to start something they never thought would grow so much beyond them. However, it is hard to date this moment precisely, because the video of Chris Chaput was published on YouTube in 2007, whereas Adam & Adam’s first longboard dancing videos were published 2006.
Adam and Adam & the Loaded years
Once upon a time, on a beautiful day of March 2006, beneath a bright and warming sun, and the last remnants of snow begin to surrender their hold upon the land, melting gently amidst the wooded wilds of the USA. Aboard a pirate ship bound for the boundless and treacherous high seas, there languishes a young man, dressed in garments much worn and frayed, with shoes that bear holes and a gap where once a tooth held place. Parched, his skin face is covered in blisters and fissures wrought by the relentless sun and a cruel want of water. Both his hands and feet have been bound by a ruthless band of pirates, as their weather-beaten ship is now bearing him far from his native soil. He is about to walk the plank*.
*Walking the plank was method of execution on pirate ships where captives had to walk on a plank of wood attached on the edge of the ship, with hands and feet tied, and jump off to drown in the water.
But it is no common plank that this man’s destiny is about to be decided upon, as this 60 inches piece of wood lays on wheels. Suddenly, from within a falling barrel concealed in the shadows, there emerges a small woman, dressed in torn green garments. She strikes a match, and its tiny flickering flame lits a red candle. Bending low, she brings the candle’s flame to the rope binding the unfortunate prisoner’s feet, hoping to melt it and set him free, but burnt instead the poor man’s skin instead, who’s painful screams resonated across the seven seas and eventually took out the flame’s last breath.
The mysterious woman appears out of the wooden barrel once again, this time holding a pair of shiny golden blades in her tiny dirty hands, and cuts through the binds like a mighty sword would melt the flesh of a thanksgiving turkey. Grateful for his newfound freedom yet confused by the thought that she could have spared him the cruel pain of fire against his parched skin, the prisoner rises unsteadily to his feet as the mischievous woman crawls back to her barrel with a playful grin on her face. He starts walking back and forth from one end of the wooden plank to the other, setting its wheels into motion, thus rolling away from his captors ship, skittishly and jestingly dancing up and down this jolly board. And there, legend says, was born longboard dancing.
If you think I romanticised this story, you are mostly mistaken, because this the actual plot of «Walking the plank», Adam & Adam’s very first longboard dancing video, is still one of the most quirky and imaginative longboard video out there.
And all the videos that succeeded this one were made in a similar style. And yet, this YouTube channel was the first contact with this sport for the first generation of longboard dancers. It laid ground for the very first steps (besides the cross step and 360 steps that already existed for decades) which where all named accordingly to the random metaphors Adam & Adam’s crazy imagination could come up with. We thus ended with step names such as the «chop the wood», where the rider stylishly carves on one leg while using the to knock off imaginary logs of wood standing on the street, and the «lookback», where the rider looks back at his neighbour’s basket ball rolling towards him after missing the hoop and casually sends it back with his board.
Adam & Adam first built their own board, which was just a very long flat piece of wood, then made one together with Longboard Larry, and finally joined Loaded Boards, an already established longboard brand specialised in cruisers and downhill boards, combining their limitless imagination with two of Loaded’s main qualities.
First of all, their high quality engineering. The first dancers were, as I just said, a flat piece of wood Loaded introduced concave into them, so they would stop twisting while carving, a tail and a nose to allow longboard dancing to become longboard dancing & freestyle, as well as many other features I will not bore you with today. All of those were combined into the Bhangra, the very first modern dancer, released in 2010.
Secondly, their rare open-mindedness. Loaded took a great leap of faith when hiring Adam & Adam and investing in longboard dancing. Sure that investment turned out great, but neither one of them had any clue or even hopes that this quirky way of using a longboard would become what it is today. Across the years, they recruited many other riders and created amazing outside-the-box media. They are still today, one of the flagship brands and main supporters of the longboard dancing community.
A lot of beautifully minded brands came on later to contribute to the development of longboard dancing, but I have a particular gratitude and affection for Loaded who invested so much into it when nobody in their right mind would have.
The 2010’s.
If the tone of Adam and Adam’s videos can make someone wonder if they were truly passionate about their craft or just making one big joke, I feel like longboard dancing was quickly taken seriously in Europe.
During the early 2010’s, few riders started to pop up here and there. To name a few, Lotfi Lamaali, a Loaded ambassador in France, started combining steps with hand tricks, creating a dynamic flow of dance and tricks. Giu Alfeo, riding for the one man German brand Bastl Boards, used their ice-skating background to introduce actual dancing to the already existing steps. I have a particular affection for Bastl as well, as they were the very first support of the Longboard Camp, back when it was just a crazy vision in Valeriya’s mind. In the Netherlands, Luutse Brower created Simple Longboards and developed a more meditative approach to longboard dancing, calmly repeating steps and drawing sinusoidal lines in a mesmerising flow. Together with filmmaker Peter Lahr, they created a lot of poetic videos, as wells as the first «steptionaries», showing the details of all the different steps, and building a Bible for anybody that was getting into the sport.
Events and competitions were organised, such as the famous So You Can Longboard Dance, in 2013 in the Netherlands, that eventually became our world championship. Communities started to grow in western Europe and attract a lot of new riders, such as DockSession, created in 2014 in Paris by Lotfi Lamaali and Alexandre Copin, a weekly meeting that was later on exported to many other countries across the globe. As this was alongside the development of social media, the visibility of the sport completely exploded. We can for example cite the Belgian rider Hans Wouters, who created the first successful rider YouTube channel, mixing beautiful videos, tutorials and Vlogs. In 2016, Australian rider Milan Somerville, published a video of him unapologetically dancing down a street, that quickly became the first viral longboard dancing video and brought tremendous visibility to our sport.
That same year, four American women appeared longboard dancing in the Red Hot Chili Peppers music video «Dark Necessities».
During that decade, communities also appeared around the world. The Russian community, led by Kate Voynova and Timur Totoev grew incredibly. South Korea was the birthplace of many highly skilled riders, mixing insane levels of technique with beautiful effortless style, as well as a the phenomenon of HyoJoo Ko, who combined modelling and longboard dancing, starting a trend in South Korea that sparked the interest of many fashion brands. Brazil was the first big community in Latin America, known both for their taste for old school tricks, as well as Brenno Gomes bringing capoeira moves to the discipline. In Portugal, Valeriya Gogunskaya, became the most followed rider, bringing longboard dancing to the lives of thousands of people, both on a screen and in real life, by creating the Longboard Camp in 2017.
It is also during that decade that a lot of women joined the sport, especially thanks to the work of Longboard Girls Crew (that has a dedicated article on this blog) and Spin Magazine.
Finally, around the end of the 2010’s longboard dancing came back to its original roots, as the interest for longboard dancing had a second rise in the USA.
As you all know, the third decade of the 21st century changed our world considerably. On the one hand, COVID put our entire community on hold, cancelling all meetings, events and competitions. On the other hand, being locked up at home gave a lot of people the desire to undertake a new outdoor activity. In other words, the expansion the core community was slowed down but as soon as we were allowed to go out, our community welcomed a lot of newcomers, and the social media exposure of some riders was taken to a whole new level. That said, I don’t really have enough perspective on our current decade to tell you about it, so I will stop here. I want to insist one more time that all this information you just read is just hearsay and, as precise and sure I tried to be about my sources, it can be inaccurate. If you have any information, do not hesitate to reach out to me so we can update this article. Anyway, I hope this gave you a bit of an idea of how a joke between to very creative guys turned out to be a beautiful sport, blessed with an incredible community, and changed the life of so many people in so many ways.
Until next time, may the flow be with you,
Axel
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