Entry · catalog no. 1158
turf dancing
/ /ˈtɜrf ˌdænsɪŋ/ /TURF DAN-sing
noun · Oakland — West Oakland and the Lower Bottoms, East Oakland, Brookfield; Richmond and the wider Bay Area · 2000s
✓ Verified
1.
A Bay Area street dance grown out of Oakland boogaloo lineage and shaped in the city neighborhoods through the 1990s and 2000s. A turfer glides, ticks, tuts, drops to the floor and disarticulates the limbs — bone-breaking — while carrying a story through it: a fight, a memory, a joke, a death. The work stays close to the ground and close to the sidewalk, using the street itself as the stage. Turfers battle rather than choreograph, and the form was practiced deliberately as a way to settle a neighborhood dispute without a weapon. The name is an acronym: Taking Up Room on the Floor.
“They shut the corner down at 90th and MacArthur and turf danced in the rain for his brother.”
2.
As a verb, to dance in that style — used without an object, and applied equally to a staged battle and to a man working alone on a BART platform. Before the name existed, Oakland dancers described what they were doing as gigging or hitting it. Turfing displaced those terms after 2000 and became the working verb, along with turfer for a practitioner.
“He been turfing since he was ten, out in front of the store on Brookfield.”
Origin & Attribution
The dance belongs to Black youth in Oakland — West Oakland Lower Bottoms first, then East Oakland — and its roots run through the Bay Area boogaloo of the 1960s, which predates New York hip-hop dance by nearly a decade and produced the move that Southern California later renamed the pop. Accounts place informal turf dancing in West Oakland by the mid-1990s under the name gigging. The name came later: Jeriel Bey, a dancer and promoter who moved to West Oakland in 2000, coined the acronym T.U.R.F. after watching a neighborhood teenager dance in his driveway. Bey organized scattered dancers into the Architeckz, staged the first competition at Laney College in late 2004, and choreographed E-40 Tell Me When to Go. Three corrections are due. Turfing is not a branch of New York breakdancing, and it is not Los Angeles krump — press coverage has repeatedly filed it as both. Bey coined the term but, by his own insistence, did not invent the dance; it existed in the neighborhoods before he named it. And the hyphy-party framing is incomplete: the RIP videos that carried turfing worldwide are funeral rites, danced at the spot where someone died.
2004
Jeriel Bey stages the first organized turf dance competition at Laney College, Oakland, matching West Oakland turfers against krump dancers from Los Angeles
2006
E-40 Tell Me When to Go, choreographed by Bey with the Architeckz, and DJ Shadow Turf Dancing put the name into national circulation
2009
YAK Films posts RIP RichD, filmed with the Turf Feinz at 90th and MacArthur days after Richard Davis death; it becomes most of the world first sight of the dance
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
Oakland — West Oakland and the Lower Bottoms, East Oakland, Brookfield; Richmond and the wider Bay Area · 2000s
Spoken by
Oakland dancers and crews (Architeckz, Turf Feinz, Animaniaks, Goon Stars, Turf Inc.), Bay Area rap and hyphy culture, the youth-center and street-battle circuit
$TURFDAThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Rising22 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
58/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
2004
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
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Atlanta, GA
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Memphis, TN
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Citations & Sources
■
Eric Arnold, "How Turf Dancing Came to Define Oakland Street Dance," KQED, 10 August 2023
news · reported
■
E-40 feat. Keak da Sneak, "Tell Me When to Go," single and video, February 2006
song · recorded
■
DJ Shadow feat. The Federation and Animaniaks, "Turf Dancing," The Outsider, Universal Motown, 19 September 2006
song · recorded
■
+ Cite a sourceTURF FEINZ RIP RichD (Dancing in the Rain), dir. Yoram Savion, YAK Films, 2009
video · released
See also