The living room smells like McDonald’s and is muggy with teenagers’ sweat. Girls flirt with boys as they play cards on the hardwood floor. One teen fixes her hair in a full wall mirror. Others smother a poodle-mix puppy with love.
Ameen Nurul-Haqq, a skinny 13-year-old, sits by himself at the dining room table in a modest south St. Petersburg home. His head bobs slightly to the beat of an R&B CD by the group The Dream playing through his headphones. He wants a moment away from the racket.
“Sometimes when I see everybody over there having fun I just want to sit down and read a magazine or listen to music to get my quiet time,” Ameen says, “so I won’t get all hyped up.”
But he can’t sit still for long. He’s soon back in the center of the action, perfecting and sharpening his hip-hop dance moves.
He is joined by another dancer, Anthony Irving. The two jostle and laugh as the others watch. Ameen imitates a girl dancer walking toward the mirror to the beat, swinging his hips and batting his eyes.
“Don’t do that again,” Anthony, 14, tells him as he laughs. The impersonation of a girl is good — too good.
Ameen and his friends are on a break from rehearsal for the group Shyann Roberts and the Critically Undefined. Shyann is an 11-year-old St. Petersburg singer and dancing diva who performs with her own hip-hop dance team. Last year, she made her national debut at the Apollo Theater in New York’s Harlem neighborhood. Ameen is a backup dancer. He earned the spot during a spring audition after teaching himself how to dance in front of a mirror with Michael Jackson videos and MTV.
But the serious teen, who is also quick to laugh at a missed dance step or a joke from a friend, hopes to emerge from Shyann’s shadow into his own spotlight. He has faith that his incessant practice — he even does small finger movements while he sits at his desk — will pay off. He wants to compete on the MTV show “America’s Best Dance Crew” and ultimately be a choreographer.
While the young performer aspires for his turn in the limelight, for now, dancing is also an outlet. He uses the movement, he says, to release anger that emerges from being a teen and living in Midtown, a neighborhood in the heart of downtown St. Petersburg where violence and poverty are often intertwined with everyday life.
“It helps me relax because if I’m mad or something, or if I’m sad, I might just go off on my own and look in the mirror or look at something that has a reflection of me and just look and dance,” he says. “Just dance without a care.”
Ameen’s mother, Iris Flounary, traces her son’s affinity to music back to the womb. When she was pregnant, Flounary wrapped headphones around her stomach, playing a tape of classical music that she got as a gift from the lingerie store Victoria's Secret. Before he could walk, Ameen was holding himself up on his father’s speakers to move to jazz and blues records.
“There was music in the house all the time,” Flounary says. “He would just hold on with one hand and the other hand up in the air and just dance.”
He gave his first performance at age 2. He had been sitting outside a family reunion in Georgia with his mother when he toddled off. All of a sudden, Flounary heard a woman yell, “Whose baby is this?”
As the radio played, a crowd of aunts, uncles and cousins gathered around the dancing toddler.
“Go, go, go,” they shouted.
“I’d go through the people and here in the middle was Ameen, and they’re saying, ‘Look at the moves. He’s not dancing like a baby,’ ” Flounary says. “I don’t know where he was getting this stuff from. I don’t think he could tell us where he was seeing it, but he was getting those moves down. I don’t know if he was making it up, but it was so good.”
That’s when she knew Ameen loved to dance and loved the attention it brought him.
“He wasn’t afraid to show them what he could do,” she says.
Flounary would catch Ameen staring at himself as he honed his dancing at home in front of a mirror. At age 5, during another family reunion, the relatives passed around a plastic cup and collected $19 for the young entertainer.
When the hip-hop movie “You Got Served” came out four years ago, Ameen stepped up his moves, as he mimicked his favorite dancer, Omarion, from the film. He has performed as a GI Joe in St. Petersburg’s “Chocolate Nutcracker” — a hip-hop, tap and modern dance version of the traditional Christmas ballet. And he starred in a Boys & Girls Club showcase as Michael Jackson.
He takes dance class twice a week at the Royal Theater’s Boys & Girls Club in Midtown. Sometimes, teachers even ask him to teach hip-hop to younger students.
In between classes, or waiting for his mother to pick him up from the Royal Theater, he’s dancing. He’s in the studio, gliding — like moonwalking, but in all directions. Or he’s in the orchestra pit, tutting — moving his arms in quick angular poses “like an Egyptian.”
“When I’m here, it’s like my practice time,” Ameen says.
Ameen’s preparation for a performance Saturday night at the Campbell Park Center includes layers and fabrics that only an image-conscious teen could stand in humid 90-degree weather. He clips on teal suspenders to match his teal polo shirt. Then he layers the polo with a navy blue T-shirt. He covers his head with a dark blue nylon do-rag, then a thick black stocking cap.
“I get nervous right before I go out — you know how you get those butterflies in your stomach,” he says as he dresses. “But when I get on stage, it’s like whatever.” He tucks his baggy jeans into his black socks because the pants are too long. “You just do it 10 times better than you do it in rehearsal, make every move harder than you did — just don’t make it sloppy.”
Each time Ameen learns a new dance step, he practices for months, striving for perfect sharpness, he says. Now he’s working on finger tutting, a quick hand version of the original move.
Ameen’s detailed footwork is why Shyann wanted him to be her backup dancer when he auditioned for Critically Undefined this spring. Shyann has already built up fame as a singer, performing nearly every weekend in the area and traveling to Miami, Detroit and New York for shows. Ameen is one of four male dancers in her 13-member dance crew.
“He’s so precise,” says Qiana Horsley, Shyann’s mother. “The love for it always comes out.”
At first Ameen hesitated about being in Shyann’s group. He wasn’t sure he wanted to dance backup. “And,” he says, “she’s younger than me.”
But his mother convinced him it would give him more exposure. He has already performed with the group at the Coconut Grove Bahamas Goombay Festival last month. The crew plans to travel to the Virgin Islands in August for a Christian youth group show.
As he finishes dressing for his Saturday performance, Ameen swings on his black miniature backpack, with his name down its center in yellow puff paint. He takes a quick glance in the bathroom mirror, spritzes some Antonio Banderas cologne and tells his mom he’s ready.
He loves dancing, he says, because it helps him relax as he focuses on the music and the movements.
“Like when I’m mad and I have anger in me, I just let it out by doing my dancing, or if I’m sad I may do like a slow dance or something, just to get it out of my system,” he says. “It’s soothing for me. It makes me feel better.”
His mother, a mental health caseworker, is just happy Ameen has something to keep him busy and safe.
The two live in a two-bedroom home on quiet dead-end street under the freeway on the outskirts of Midtown, a checkerboard area that mixes 1950s single-family homes with low-income housing. Local crab shacks share strips with abandoned storefronts. Residents sit on lawn chairs chatting in front of convenient stores or grouped together in front of rundown apartment buildings. Teens gather in front yards, spilling into the street.
Flounary, a single mother, has kidney disease and is on a waiting list for a new organ. She recently began home dialysis.
She moved back to St. Petersburg, her hometown, when Ameen was 3 years old, thinking she could get away from the sound of bullets she often heard while living in Washington, D.C. But lately, she says, she can hear them from their home here, too. She tells Ameen to stay away from big groups of teens, where, she says, feuds can become gunfights.
“I just keep him prayed up,” she says. She prays for God to protect him every night.
One of Ameen’s friends was recently jumped and beat up in Midtown. Ameen was angry at what happened and angry he wasn’t there to help. He used dancing as his emotional cleansing.
“My way is, like, instead of ‘oh I’m gonna shoot you, I’m gonna beat you up, I’m gonna do this to you, all these bad things,’ I just do it without any violence,” he says. “I just go and dance, and it gets out of me.”
Ameen sits with his fellow backup dancer, Anthony, on a clear plastic box of Legos waiting for their cue. They each pick up some Legos and fiddle with them.
Shyann Roberts and the Critically Undefined are about to perform at a family reunion in the Campbell Park Center in downtown St. Petersburg. This time, Ameen gets to perform for a family he doesn’t know.
“What you are about to see is some of the best of the best of the best,” a DJ announces.
Ameen keeps his backpack on during the dances, a technique he picked up from a local dance crew. The group has some technical difficulties. The CD skips, and they repeat a whole dance number. Shyann’s microphone disconnects from its power cord. But Ameen shines. His tutting is sharper than in rehearsal and his gliding smoother. His hours of practice are visible with each energetic step. He has a few moments in the spotlight during a small solo and a duo with Shyann.
After the performance, Ameen goes to a roller skate rink with some of the dancers, then spends the night at Anthony’s house. When he’s not at the Royal Theater, rehearsal or school, he says, he likes to be a “regular kid” and even play video games.
He is, after all, a teenager.