Versa-Style Dance Company brings hip-hop show to Santa Rosa

Decades ago, hip-hop dancing leaped from the streets to the screen and stage, but for the Versa-Style Dance Company of Los Angeles the quest continues to gain wider acceptance for the style - once considered a fad - as legitimate dance theater.

“In terms of exposure, I think hip-hop is getting more widely recognized,” said Leigh Foaad, 35, who founded Versa-Style in 2005, with co-director and dancer Jackie Lopez, now his wife.

“Hip-hop is becoming the New Age dance of today. Young people today are recognizing our movement through radio, TV, YouTube and dance shows,” Foaad said in a recent phone interview.

Their company will make its first trip to Santa Rosa next week, for a performance at the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts.

“We are coming from a very positive standpoint when it comes to hip-hop street dance,” Foaad said. “I know it can get a bad rep, but we are here to prove that wrong and show you the positive side and the lighter side, but also the depth and history of our culture.”

As part of that outreach, Versa-Style encourages its audiences to loosen up and get into the show.

“I know that with many theaters and companies, whether it is ballet, contemporary or modern dance, or opera, you usually clap afterwards, after the show is done. Hip-hop is totally opposite. We feed off the audience's energy. We love to hear the clapping and the chants, always in a respectful manner,” Foaad said.

“It's a comfortable, open family feel, where we hope to spread the light and positivity of hip-hop culture.”

Foaad, also known as Breeze Lee, and Lopez, aka Miss Funk, have performed, lectured and competed all over the world. The Versa-Style company tours five to eight times a year, mostly up and down California, with past trips to Utah and Scotland.

“I like to think of us as a thriving, upcoming company, so our name is still getting recognized. We're still in the early stages,” Foaad said.

Versa-Style covers a wide range of street dance moves in its performances, and also incorporates the salsa, cumbia, merengue styles and more, set to music that is a playful mix of old and new.

“It really is all kinds of music. Of course, we have to have that beat. We call it the one and the two, or the boom and the clap. That's our pulse, so we can bounce and rock. But you're going to hear house music, hip-hop and some old Motown music from the '70s,” Foaad said. “I grew up with my Mom listening to Motown.”

The Versa-Style Dance Company is a nonprofit with an educational and training mission in the Los Angeles area, in addition to its touring and performance work.

“We have local community dance events where we invite many people, in terms of hip-hop legends and teachers around the area, and we have mini-competitions,” Foaad said. “Our young generation of students get the idea of what the essence of hip-hop is, based on a freestyle dancing feeling and lifestyle.”

Students have an opportunity to work their way up through Versa-Style's Next Generation junior company, which performs at regional dance festivals, and ultimately audition for the main company.

“If they get in, it becomes a full circle,” Foaad explained, “and they go back to the schools and recruit and reach out to the community, and we just keep this cycle going.”

You can reach Staff Writer Dan Taylor at 707-521-5243 or dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @danart.