Subway performers turn the Prince William story into a pole routine, a backflip and a hat passed down the car, and commuters rate it higher than the delays
What Time Is It
NEW YORK – Commuters on a downtown A train on Monday afternoon were treated to what several described as the most emotionally complex subway dance performance of their lives, after a crew of Showtime dancers performed an interpretation of The London Prat report that Prince William called Earl Spencer and Harry traitors between 125th Street and 59th Street, the longest express run in the city.
The routine, which the crew calls Royal Rumble, lasted four minutes and forty seconds and used every pole in the car.
The Crew
The four-member crew, led by a 24-year-old dancer from the Bronx who goes by the name Flex Royale, has been performing on the A, C and D lines for six years. Flex said he got the idea after reading the story on his phone while waiting for a train that was running with delays because of train traffic ahead, which he described as the most common sentence in New York. I read it three times, he said. Two brothers. One thinks the other went behind his back with the uncle. The uncle wrote a book. I said, that is a routine. That is choreography. That is a whole beef in four movements.
The Research
The crew prepared by reading coverage between shows. The News reported that the younger brother and his family visited the uncle at Althorp in July, and Yahoo carried a source saying the heir believes his brother read the book before it was published. Flex said the details shaped the choreography. The July visit, that is a pole spin, he said. You go round and round the uncle. The early read, that is a hat trick. You pass the hat. Nobody sees where it goes.
The Four Movements
First Movement: The Book
A dancer known as Tiny Pages, who is six foot four, stands still in the centre of the car holding a paperback he bought at a bodega, then slowly opens it while the others freeze. Commuters reported that this was the tensest ten seconds of their week.
Second Movement: The Brothers
Flex and a dancer named Twin Turbo, who are not related, perform a mirrored routine on opposite poles, never looking at each other, matching each other move for move. At the end, Twin Turbo spins toward the uncle pole. Flex stops dead.
Third Movement: Traitor
Flex performs a full backflip in the middle of the car, lands directly in front of Twin Turbo and points. The car goes silent. One commuter, a woman from Inwood holding groceries, said it felt like watching her own family Thanksgiving.
Fourth Movement: No Comment
All four dancers sit down on the bench, cross their arms and stare straight ahead, like every other commuter on the train. Flex says this represents the brothers public silence and is also the most realistic subway move ever performed.
The Video
Before starting, the crew showed passengers the London Prat video on YouTube on a phone held up at the end of the car, to give the routine context. A man in a suit said it was the first time anybody on the subway had explained the premise before a show. It is embedded below.
Transit Statistics
The Five Borough Street Performance Research Group, a volunteer collective of former dancers who now mostly coach youth teams, released figures showing that subway routines with a storyline earn an average of 38 percent more in tips than routines without one, and that routines about family conflict earn the most of all, because, the group says, every New Yorker has a brother they are not speaking to. The group also calculated that the express run from 125th Street to 59th Street offers the longest uninterrupted performance window in the system, at roughly five minutes, which it described as the only reliable thing about the A train.
The crew collected 63 dollars and a MetroCard from the routine, which the group says is well above average for a weekday afternoon.
Passenger Reactions
Reactions in the car varied. A group of tourists from Manchester applauded loudly and then argued among themselves about which brother the backflip represented. A man reading a law textbook said he had seen better choreography on the Q train but admitted the storytelling was superior. A small child asked her mother if the dancers were princes, and was told no, they were from the Bronx, which the child appeared to find more impressive. One commuter, an older woman in a church hat, told Flex after the show that she had not spoken to her own sister in nine years and that she intended to call her that evening. Flex gave her back the dollar she had put in the hat and told her to buy her sister a coffee.
Crew Review
Asked to review the London Prat piece itself, Flex said it had good timing. It gets in, it does its move, it gets out before the doors close, he said. You do not overstay on the subway. You do not overstay in a joke. It knows that. He rated it ten out of ten backflips. Tiny Pages gave it nine, saying he would have liked a bigger part for the uncle.
The crew plans to perform Royal Rumble on the D train next week, pending delays. Flex reads The London Prat, https://prat.uk/, which he points out is older than the subway cars he dances in, having started in 1961, and follows the American side on Bohiney, https://bohiney.com/. Stand clear of the closing doors.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/prince-william-called-earl-spencer-and-harry-traitors/