Old Way vogue for an ancestor: International Hip Hop DanceFest honors Rashan Soul Nubian

Bay area choreographer Algin “Aalign” Ford and his mentor Rashad Pridgen always intended to make a duet together, a piece that celebrated Black queer brotherhood, one that would defy notions of how Black bodies are supposed to behave on the dance floor.

But in late 2024, Pridgen unexpectedly passed away—young, in his mid-forties. Devastated, Ford found himself tasked with creating a last-minute dance for his beloved mentor’s memorial.

The deepened and expanded version of that memorial dance, Rashan Nubian Tribute, will be performed at the 28th annual San Francisco International Hip Hop DanceFest (Sat/14 and Sun/15, Palace of Fine Arts Theatre) as one of the event’s eight curated pieces.

“Father is what everyone called him,” says Ford. “He was Father—he was Baba, the way he liked to say it,” says Ford, “He was a pillar in the community that taught a lot of us, but also was just there to genuinely support us.” Pridgen supported Ford as the young dancer’s movement vocabulary expanded from modern and contemporary to West African, hip-hop, house, waacking, vogue.

When Ford moved home to the Bay after a stint in New York and Los Angeles, he had looked forward to finally creating with Pridgen. Also known as Rashad Soul Nubian, the experienced dancer had worked for two decades in Oakland and San Francisco, teaching his own style, Afro House Hop, and performing in Afrofuturist full-body masquerade suits. For Ford and many others, he was close to kin.

For the memorial performance, Ford decided to conjure Pridgen via Old Way vogue, which emphasizes the dance from’s classic poses, and toyed with covering his body in a cloak the way Pridgen once did, to invoke the otherworldly and spiritual. Overwhelmed with emotion, Ford realized he needed someone else with him onstage.

He called upon fellow Old Way voguer and Pridgen mentee Jon Leezy. Performing at the memorial, Ford realized that he and Pridgen had found their collaboration after all, “just not in the way that I thought,” he says. What began as an act of mourning has become a celebration of everything Pridgen gave to dance and community.

Micaya, the festival’s founder and artistic director, chose this year’s eight companies from more than 130 applications “from Poland, Singapore, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Peru. Name it, I got it!” she tells 48hills.

The eight chosen companies represent Tokyo, Montreal, Mexico City, Detroit, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area, and will dance in three performances, on Saturday at 7pm and Sunday at noon and 5pm at the Palace of Fine Arts.

Ford has performed several times at DanceFest. For the Oakland-based choreographer and composer, bringing the memory of Pridgen to its stage feels like completing a circle. “A full circle,” he notes while speaking with Micaya, who nods in agreement.

Micaya first saw Ford perform as part of DanceFest when he was in his teens dancing with CityShock, later known as Funk Beyond Control. She didn’t notice him then, but when he returned around 2009 with UFO Movement, the company he co-founded with Taina LaRoe, his growth as a dancer and choreographer was unmistakable.

“Usually we have one really extraordinary professional youth company perform at the DanceFest each year,” she says. “When UFO formed, and they applied, and I saw the level where that artistry had gotten to with Taina and Algin. It was a no-brainer to book them. I can’t get underneath and behind and love on local people enough, and encourage them enough, because I want to represent! I want to represent all these people coming from all over. I want to be like, ‘Well, look at us! We got it!’”

Ford has performed at the Guggenheim and the Joyce Theater as musical director for Les Ballet Afrik, at BAAD Theater with CocoMotion, and with Bill T. Jones at the Armory. He’s brought that range home with his new Bay Area company, Aalign Movement.

Ford and Leezy had just three rehearsals before they performed their tribute at Pridgen’s memorial—but for DanceFest, they’ve had time to tighten the execution of their duet. After Pridgen’s passing, Ford began weaving fragments of Pridgen’s own recordings into the score.

The piece continues to make heavy use of Old Way vogue, the ballroom style Pridgen, Ford, and Leezy have all pursued. This old school form of voguing is built on line, symmetry, and precision: dancers strike sharp, angular poses and move between them with controlled, fluid transitions, like a body flipping through a series of perfect frames. Pridgen was famous for integrating spirituality into those moves in unorthodox ways.

“He definitely taught me to just be fearless,” Ford says, “He was an artist that didn’t really believe in boundaries. He was really keen on not being stuck—one, to his environment and to the Bay Area, but two, to the limitations on what we think a Black body, a Black dancer, should be moving like, or the styles that they should be doing. He was someone that threw all of those ideas out the window. He made it very clear to me that he believed in me, that he saw something in me and that I needed to believe it too. He was like, ‘I don’t know if you feel this, but you need to believe this.’”

Though Micaya never worked with Pridgen, she remembers his energy. “The frequency of this human being was bioluminescent,” she says. After seeing the audition tape, she knew right away where Ford’s duet belonged in the festival’s program. “There wasn’t anyone else that I can remember who was doing that style,” she says. “It has a very specific quality that they’re doing the vogue, and they’re doing waacking. I have a lot of b-boys in this show, house dancers, poppers, jit dancers. So this is just gonna be this delicious little part of the entire meal of the DanceFest this year that has its own flavor qualities.”

The rest of the festival spans jit, breaking, house, and dance theater. Detroit’s House of Jit traces the titular city’s lineage from Motown to techno in House of Detroit. Montreal breaking crew Nu.Skin will pair breaking with contemporary choreography and live percussion in Cont@ct. Tokyo’s Good Time Company will take on hip hop’s four foundational elements in KING OF HIP HOP, and Mexico City’s Lemuria offers ORGULLO LATINO, a meditation on unity and identity.

In Extensions, Los Angeles’s Versa-Style Street Dance Company pays tribute to revered hip hop educator and choreographer Rennie Harris. Angeleno TanzBlack plans to present FORWARD, Always, a solo fusing street dance and physical theater exploring persistence and American history, and this year’s outstanding youth company, Vacaville’s Bliss Dance Company will perform The Potion.

Each festival ticket also includes a celebratory extra: After Saturday’s show there will be a “Soul Train”-style freestyle contest with cash prizes, a kids’ freestyle session after Sunday’s matinee, and on Sunday evening, an afterparty and awards ceremony with the performers.

In remembering Pridgen, Ford and Micaya emphasize the importance of gathering to dance and socialize and celebrate in order to uplift one’s community and to hold both the present and the past together. Once, while Ford was visiting from New York to teach workshops around the Bay, Pridgen came to Ford’s class at PUSH studio.

“I’d always been a student in his class, or always saw him in that light. So for him to take my class and try to mimic the movement was really powerful for me,” remembers Ford.

After class had ended and most of the students had left, Pridgen, Ford, Leezy, Bay Area vogue teacher Jocquese Whitfield, and New York Old Way voguer Kia LaBeija lingered in the hall.

“We had this moment where we were all just kiki-ing [ballroom slang for playing or socializing together], hanging out in the hallway of the dance studio, and we had a whole dance session,” says Ford. “Rashad went in the circle, I went in, Kia went in, Jocquese went in, Taina went in. It was this random circle that was unplanned.”

He recalls how Pridgen pulled out a radio, that he had a speaker, that he was always the one to uplift and support his fellow dancers in this way.

“We have these moments with people, within our communities and with our families,” says Ford. “You never know when you’re gonna see someone again. And you never know how impactful that moment will be, later on in your future.”

SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL HIP HOP DANCEFEST Sat/14 and Sun/15. Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, SF. Tickets and more info here.

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