Johnny Lloyd has been a musician and poet his whole life, starting with trumpet at eight. He studied Jazz and Classical Music at Fullerton College in Orange County and poetry at the University of California, Irvine. He started dancing after seeing street dancers doing Lindy Hop at a Jazz concert. In 1996 he started teaching dance in San Diego where he developed the Lindy Hop scene as San Diego's first Lindy Hop teacher. While continuing to produce music and poetry he intensely studied early Jazz Dance and the early forms of Hip Hop (Boogaloo, Popping) and became a sought after teacher in Lindy Hop and Vintage Swing Jazz. He now teaches and performs full time internationally, having taught regularly across Europe and the States for ten years.

 

Johnny is an Associated Artist with "Hajusom - a Utopian Space"  In Hamburg, Germany. On their website, http://www.hajusom.de/html/home/gb.php they describe their mission:  " Since 1999 , especially juvenile and young adult refugees and migrants from the most diverse countries of origin in Africa, Asia and Europe come and work together. As a trans-national art project, Hajusom brings together people who are active citizens of a complex globalised world yet who bear within themselves their own individual maps. They are protagonists obliged to turn their backs on their national outlooks and make migration visible as a central force for social change. In their role as artists, they now recreate their own experiences and present them in various formats: In theatre performances, video and CD productions, space installations and texts.  Since its foundation and in the context of its art and research projects some extending over several years, Hajusom has dedicated itself to the subjects of fleeing troubled areas and migration in the globalisation era. The project permits its actors to develop their own language capable of transporting their experiences, their knowledge and their dreams. In addition when working together, various forms of art and indeed of communication are researched and developed which are exemplary for the process whereby national borders are losing their meaning in a world going through a period of upheaval.  We have to get used to the idea that our identity is fundamentally changed by contact with others, just like their identities change through contact with us, without the one or the other denaturalising themselves or dissolving themselves in a multicultural magma. Edouard Glissant In the meaning as described above, Hajusom is concerned with the concept of a deep cultural mixture: As a microcosm, Hajusom is effective as a utopian space where in a process of collective artistically creative work, such a concept of (inter) relations can be achieved as a contrast to political, cultural and religious dominance."