Post arrest, Project Positive founder Damon Holley sets sights on new markets.
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Twenty-five year-old Damon Holley wasn’t dancing when SEPTA’s transit police pulled him off the Market-Frankford line and handcuffed him to another individual, offering him to take the “easy way or the hard way.” However, his familiar face, associated largely with the Project Positive hip-hop dance organization, has been linked recently with complaints of “aggressive panhandling,” that alone seemed to be enough for authorities to detain him and eventually throw him in an awaiting paddy wagon for a sleepover at the station.
“I asked if I was being arrested, they told me no. I told them if I wasn’t being arrested then there was no reason to put the handcuffs on me,” recalls Holley, who said he’s harassed often by SEPTA cops when performing his routine. Along with Donny Thompson, Holley was charged last week with disorderly conduct and defiant trespassing.
During an exclusive interview with Techbook Online, Holley claims to have been only dancing on the train because of the “cold winter, harsh winds and icy streets.” And while he has pledged to stay off the trains, Holley and his teammates seem to think the local transportation company is missing out on a business opportunity that can provide a unique traveling experience for riders.
Known better as Dink or Dink the Clown, Holley believes his acrobatic flips and engaging pitches would attract tourist to the city and encourage more people to ride SEPTA. He says no other city but Philly would be able to tout live programming on a moving train. In his living room, accompanied by twenty-three year old Antiwne Freeman and sixteen year-old Dante McCollumn – both members of Project Positive – Holley shows me how he incorporates SEPTA into his subway showcase.
“Ladies and gentleman, this performance is brought to you by SEPTA, they’re going places, are you?” they say in unison.
Although anxious to mend their relationship with SEPTA and hopeful the company will arrange a space for their dancers to perform – as they say the small permitted performance space is limited to musicians and singers – Holley and the Project Positive crew are flipping in a new direction – edutainment.
Standing in between his coffee table and flat screen TV, with no more than three feet of space – which for the moment was transformed into a stage – Holley demonstrated how he integrates math and hip-hop to engage children and increase their comprehension. Playing to the crowd, Holley called for a volunteer. Freeman, his right-hand man, stepped up to plate.
“In hip-hop choreography, when you’re counting, it goes up to eight and starts over,” Holley explains, as he and Freeman do eight distinct dance moves. “If I take two away from the eight count how many will I have?” he asked rhetorically, before repeating the moves and stopping at a six count. Holley and Freeman continued all the way to two before adding back up to eight. “It’s all about recognizing patterns,” says Holley.
They even had a way to incorporate basic geometry into break dancing, or “breaking,” as Holley puts it.
Optimizing the small space and surprisingly not knocking anything over, Holley quickly gets on his head and contorts his body to display examples of a right angle, acute angle and an obtuse angle.
“From learning math they’re learning how to dance and developing eye hand coordination; they’re learning so much in one,” he says with glee.
Despite the charges against him, Holley is oddly appreciative of the incident and the fact the media has caught on, as it’s put the group “on another plateau.” He says the workshop he did last Tuesday at a West Philadelphia recreational center was packed with young people and he hopes to continues flipping and spinning through the city, putting smiles on people faces and a maybe few bucks in his pockets.
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