When I begin recording our interview, dancer Storyboard P declines to sit. "I usually stand," he says, fidgeting in front of me as he gestures for me to take a seat on his sofa, "'cause I'm pretty animated, y'know?"
"Pretty animated" might be the biggest understatement that's ever been used about a man whose dancing seems to belong less to the limitations of the human body and more to the magic of special effects.
At 23 years old, Story, as he calls himself, is widely regarded as the world's greatest exponent of flex, a genre of street dance. As with rap battles, flex is both narrative and combative and, like contemporary hip-hop, it's a digest of pre-existing genres: the popping and breakdance that came out of California in the 60s, the precise, gestural voguing of New York's LBGT subculture in the 80s and the frenetic spasms of Los Angeles krump that emerged at the turn of this century.
"It all derived from African dance," he says, referring to the evolution of contemporary street dance, "that path of struggle. There's a resurgence now [of flex] and we're taking it and reshaping it, re-forming it with our visual literacy."
We're speaking in a small apartment in a housing project in Manhattan where Story is currently staying with his fiancee, Saucey, a clothing designer. The ceilings are painted black and beneath them a thick cloud of marijuana fug thickens while Story uses the long and narrow room like a stage. For the next hour, he doesn't stop moving or talking and as the latter becomes vaguer and harder to follow the dancing only becomes more lucid.
His movements tend to be more lyrical than those of other street dancers and it's this embrace of the high flown along with the low down that caused the New Yorker to proclaim him "the Basquiat of street dancing" and the New York Times to describe him as "an extraordinary mover" as well as a "superlative eccentric".
Story has named his own form of flex "mutant" – "It's taking everything, all types of forms, and just smashing it together with animation". The elliptical, undulating shapes he describes are usually accompanied by a wily grin that says he knows he's bewitching you and there's nothing you can do about it, and the suddenness with which he can snap into the martial, roboticised motions of more traditional locking and popping only compounds that bewitchment. His signature style, though, is an "animation" effect, achieved by punctuating those fluid movements with abrupt, precise stops, so that his body seems to flicker and flare like a stop-motion film or a glitching onlinevideo.
It's where the name "Storyboard" comes from – he seeks to tell a story with the frame-by-frame precision of an animator and the awe-inducing wizardry of a special-effects artist. The P, meanwhile, is a left-over from his old avatar, "Professoar", a name that combines his nerdiness (he used to burlesque his own brainiac tendencies by performing in a white lab coat) and the soaring nature of his illusory footwork.
Today, he's dressed in a lemon yellow Wu-Tang Clan T-shirt, army fatigues ("because I'm on a mission") and a US flag-patterned woolly hat perched high up on top of his head that makes him look at once clownish and mystic. Watch him dance and you realise he's both – a showman and a shaman. When I tell him that his performances often seem supernatural, he insists that "there's just a lot of things around us we don't pay attention to". He cites air – "Who sees that?" – and then bodily bacteria. The verbal riff that follows is less eloquent than the movements that accompany it: he mimes insects moving down his arm and a slow-motion recoil of horror.
Virtually all of Story's work is improvised and when he's asked to perform in music videos or at live events he prefers not to hear the music beforehand.
"I know where the feeling is coming from, I see the light coming from the music and I see how I should move – the light tells me. If it's bass, you gotta show them the weight; if it's a clap, you gotta show them the sharpness. Each part of the music is a different kinetic."
So when Jay Z invited him to appear in the "video" for Picasso Baby – a performance art piece inspired by the artist Marina Abramovic, in which the rapper sang his track Picasso Baby over and over for six hours in Manhattan's Pace Gallery accompanied by various cultural figures (the footage was later edited down for the music video) – Story showed up without having listened to the song. Unlike the other awed invitees, Story seemed to take it upon himself to dazzle and dominate the host. Out of the dozens of "guests" who had their moment with the master, only he and Abramovic were granted the entire song and Jay Z swiftly ceded the small stage entirely to Story. The final edit features a few seconds of Story glaring at the rap titan with his arms skywards, pulling his black shirt taut above him like a cobra about to strike.
It's a fine moment, but his YouTube videos, most of them recorded in a single shot, are even finer. ("They crown me king of the one-take lane.") My favourite features him traversing a hotel corridor in London in 2012. Of the 100,000 or so views that Flight has notched up on YouTube, at least a dozen are mine: it's a hard thing to watch only once. Over four minutes, he moves towards the camera languorously, almost ecstatically, like gravity's something to bend and time's a thing to break.
When I mention it though, he's dismissive. "It reminds people of the Jamiroquai video," he scoffs, referring to Virtual Insanity, the 1996 music video in which the floor seems to move.
"You see, this is what people want to see… " and begins to move his feet like a figure skater floating inches above the ground. "They want to see this, with the glide. They just want to see that constant illusion."
He may relish unnerving audiences with this kind of footwork trickery, but insists that every move is also grounded in a kind of honesty of expression. As he puts it: "My art doesn't come from me chiselling things and hiding things. I give every vibration. There's a truth people want to see in art and a lot of people who create art take the truth out of it."
So how does he make sure he's keeping the truth in?
"I do a physical census of my day," he says simply. "I mentally and physically record everything I'm going through in my life as it's happening," he says, "and I turn it into animation – I move through it, I'm clicking and counting. And then I choose what I want to take from my real life to create art."
In other words, even when he's not dancing, he's mentally dancing, by turning every experience he has into a movement in his head. It sounds as exhausting and obsessive as keeping an hour-by-hour diary of every day.
"I'm at the brink of memorising maybe a hundred screen writes," he adds, referring to his choreography sequences. When he tries to explain how I'm left gaping: "It's an encyclopedia of forms and dance styles that I archived. I've broken them into a rubric, a sort of algorithm in my head. It's all my ideas and then I have these numbers. I have them in compartments and then there are motions that go with them, so if I do this, it reminds me I've got to do this and this. And then my mind just… [he makes an explosion sound] and just… " and he snaps his fingers in steady, rhythmic succession.
That's insane, I say appreciatively. Saucey, observing all this from the corner, corrects me: "It's genius."
Story was born Saalim Thabit Muslim, in Brooklyn's Crown Heights, the younger son of Adib Muslim and Rosita Barker. His parents were artists and the family lived in a one-bedroom apartment, getting by on welfare cheques and sharing a bed. It sounds pretty brutal, particularly because the physical privations were compounded by a difficult relationship with his father. "My dad was a monster," he says, "but if he wasn't that strict I wouldn't be built like I'm built. I wouldn't break down things mathematically the way I do." Ultimately though, he maintains a kind of stoic reticence about his father. "You state the facts and you leave it alone," he says.
Encouraged by his grandmother, he used to dance at family parties, but his most important early memory of movement is watching Michael Jackson: the first time he saw him on television he cried – not out of wonder, but fear. "It was horrible, I was intimidated," he says. "It was like I was seeing my big brother or something. There was something biblical about him, something sacred."
He speaks reverentially about Whitney Houston too: "All the greats vibrate when they perform — my glide comes from how she sings."
Though he briefly attended dance classes at the Harlem School of the Arts, his talents made him impatient. He explains: "I can naturally do whatever style they want to do, so when they're doing it it doesn't impress me. That made me not want to accept other styles at first."
His dance education began with bruk up (meaning "broken up"), a style of dance named after its Jamaican creator, whose signature contortions took off in Brooklyn reggae clubs in the early 00s. Story began competing in dance battles when he was 13 and in 2007 he took part in the inaugural BattleFest flex tournament and won. But outside of these competitions he was tackling real-life battles and violence. "That was the 90s in Brooklyn," he says. "It was a jungle.
"I was selective with when I chose to rebuttal [sic] physically with people in the streets," he says. "You gotta be very, very sound. I was smart, smarter than other people."
In other words, he picked his fights carefully. As he explains it, there'd be no point decking someone if there was a chance they might then get five of their crew to retaliate.
"My cousins would tear apart McDonald's and beat up whole basketball teams – that's just what they did. I know how to dodge bullets. I used to fight all the time but I knew if I wanted to be a serious artist I couldn't live like that."
Like Jay Z and the other hip-hop luminaries he admires, Story is both a traditionalist and a visionary; someone respectfully versed in the history of the form, who also wants to push things wider. His Twitter handle is ETHEREALSTORY, which seems to sum up his mission: keeping it "real" by honouring his cultural inheritance, yet also seeking the ethereal in terms of transcendental skill and acclaim. A rapper's path to an audience is established, but how does a street artist evolve beyond the streets? Story, who's appeared in several music videos, hopes for a new culture of "visual recording artists".
"Artists should reach out," he says, "get the real dancers who are doing their thing and get them to dance in their video – do real business with them. I think when that happens hip-hop is going to advance."
He mentions a recent project with Sony, an extended commercial set to Michael Jackson's Slave to the Rhythm, but before long he's speaking in vague but foreboding terms about corporations and "the system": "When you're in the system, you're part of a corporation. I'm not part of a corporation."
Is that, I ask, why he doesn't own a mobile phone? (Because signing up for one would make him part of a corporation?) From her throne in the corner Saucey makes a TV gameshow victory noise – "Ding ding ding ding ding!" – to signal I'm correct. Story, still gliding, just nods.
The room is now full of smoke and Story is urging me to video him on my phone as he moves. (I do.) He cocks his knee and raises his left foot. And then it begins to vibrate like some kind of tuning device. I tell him it looks like he's channelling into some kind of frequency. "That's what it is," he says. He repeats it, emphatically, "that's what it is – that energy, you're grabbing it."
