Homeland Cultural Arts Center has seen it all: Martial arts classes, African drummers, breakdance memorials. And you don’t stop

PHOTO by ZACK PIANKO

It’s open all day, but Homeland Cultural Arts Center doesn’t start popping—or drumming or acting or breaking—until the streetlights come on. Then the scene shifts from soccer in MacArthur Park outside to whatever’s happening on these scarred hardwood floors or in the portable trailer. Tonight, it’s a memorial for Frosty Freeze, one of breakdancing’s pioneers.

“We’re lucky to have [Homeland],” says Easy Rock, an old-school breakdancer and member of the famed West Coast Rock Steady Crew. “It’s not going anywhere and it hasn’t changed. It doesn’t have an agenda. It doesn’t force anything down your throat.”

The hip-hop community loves that about Homeland, but then so do the Hmong dancers, the African drummers, the poets, the graffiti muralists and the local playwrights. Founded in 1989 and run until 2006 by now-retired city employee Dixie Swift—who saw it as a place for the art people do, not just the art they watch—Homeland offers (and is) something for almost everyone.

That’s why the superintendent of Long Beach parks says she’s considering nominating Homeland this spring for the National League of Cities’ municipal excellence award. It’s why this squat, 1950s ex-library has become an international hip-hop destination. And it’s why Swift, who turned 73 recently, hated to retire. This was her second home, too.

“I used to love those nights, the breakdance nights,” Swift says. “They’d take the bus and they’d come in and I’d be sitting over there in the corner and they’d come over and shake my hand—and then they’d go bust a move.

“It wasn’t about us trying to teach hip-hop. The graffiti wasn’t about us teaching people to do graffiti. They were doing an art form, and it was about us giving them walls and a place for them to do it legally.”

The B-boys—“B” for “beat” or “breakdance”—know that.

“There’s nowhere else in Los Angeles where you can have a DJ every week, atmosphere and people helping each other,” says Tut Master, a 1980s popper who works days as a custodian at Wilson High School. Popping, he explains, is breakdancing’s elder, upright dance cousin.

Tut Master wears a work jacket with a portrait of the late Fred “Rerun” Berry airbrushed on the back, and he has to explain that, too—to a kid on a bicycle who thinks a rerun is a repeat of Martin.

“Credit him for that hip-hop dancing they do today—‘Rerun’ Fred Berry. He was the first,” Tut Master says.

“Did he get shot?” the kid asks.

“You know what’s funny?” asks Tut Master, who is spending his birthday here. “[When] they mean to ask, ‘Did somebody die?’, they say, ‘Did he get shot?’”

The area around MacArthur Park has always been tough and working class, but the part-time city employees who staff Homeland—like graphic designer Jose Martinez, who runs the graffiti program, and Mike “Ice Man” Rivera, another West Coast Rock Steady Crew member—say it’s improved dramatically over the past decade.

“Eight to nine years ago, this area was gang-infested,” says Martinez, who has been coming to Homeland since seeing a presentation by Swift when he was at Franklin Middle School and the Center was still over on Gaviota Avenue. “All the windows around all the offices have roll calls of all the gang members etched in there.”

Tonight—April 9—is a roll call of a different sort. Six days earlier, breakdance pioneer Wayne “Frosty Freeze” Frost died in his native New York at age 44. He’s remembered as a nice guy; for his half-back flip, the revolutionary result of a flip gone wrong; for being one of the first b-boys on film, in Flashdance and Wild Style; and the first to make the cover of a weekly paper (the Village Voice in 1981).

“At first they didn’t take it to the ground,” Tut Master says. “He was one of the first to take it to the ground.”

They buried Frosty Freeze earlier today, and tonight he’s being danced to his rest on the floors of Homeland by members of his own crew, the Rock Steady, and he will be temporarily immortalized by muralists on cinderblock walls outside.

“That way people can see that and see that we have respect for this,” Ice Man says. “A lot of times people think we’re haters ’cause we come from LA, but that’s not what it’s about.”

Dance rehearsals started at 6, but the memorial service gets under way just an hour before the doors close at 10. The hip-hop world doesn’t keep bankers’ hours.

Slowly, the crowd inside Homeland swells to more than 50 dancers and their admirers. There are RSC veterans in Gothic-lettered T-shirts reading “R.I.P. Frosty Freeze,” a fashion designer from Obey, and members of a local dance crew Soul 2 Soul, which recently auditioned for America’s Best Dance Crew after the cultural programs supervisor here suggested it. (“Why not?” asks the supervisor, James Ruggirello. “This is an enclave. They don’t have the money and they don’t know there’s another way. They think the way things are is the way they always have to be.”)

Finally, around 9 p.m., the DJ hands B-Boy Don Sevilla the microphone—a set of headphones plugged into the mic jack. Sevilla, an old-school Long Beach breaker who stopped dancing for a time (but now sometimes brings his young daughter to practice), speaks from the heart.

“He has been marked as a man who inspired countless people, including me,” B-boy Don says. “This is for you, Frosty. May you rock a cipher in heaven.”

Outside, the aerosol paints—Rustoleums and Krylons and obscure touch-ups—are smelling so good that one of the four painters actually wears a respirator. But it’s becoming evident that the mural won’t be finished tonight. That’s one of the few things the painters will say, probably because they’ve been peppered with questions from the scooter set all night.

“Come back tomorrow. We’ll be putting on the finishing touches then,” says painter Jacob Blankenship of Bellflower.

They’ll be there. Hip-hop doesn’t stop.

Tags: breakdancing, community activism, graffiti, hip hop, homeland cultural center, Long Beach