Continuing a long tradition of collaborating with up-and-coming artists and talent, FCUK is thrilled to announce its latest campaign featuring W.A.F.F.L.E Crew – the artist collective of LiteFeet dancers keeping New York City’s underground culture alive.
W.A.F.F.L.E Crew, an acronym that stands for “We Are Family For Life Entertainment,” is composed of 12 young dancers born and raised in New York City’s 5 boroughs. The members first met in their mid-teens while competing at weekly LiteFeet battle events, but soon realised that they were stronger when they performed as a unit. After banding together, the group has gone viral for their incredible moves and uplifting attitude, and have set a life goal to be a positive influence on their community and everyone around the world.
Since we relaunched the brand in the US, they’ve become a part of our FCUK community over the years and are big supporters of the brand. From dance battle events to charity workshops, they bring that energy, the unexpected and spread positivity to inspire change in their local community.
We’ve been inspired to share their story so we caught up with the crew on set to learn more about their beginnings and their hopes for the future. Scroll to read more.
How did W.A.F.F.L.E get started?
W.A.F.F.L.E started from dancing on the subway. We used to go to these dance events called Center of Lite, Dark Wards, Friday Night Lights. It used to be like $10 to get into the event and our parents would give us $20, $30 so we had to get money for the event, money to buy food afterwards, and that wasn’t enough so we started dancing on the subways. Then we accumulated a lot of cash so we decided to turn it into a side business. When you’re making 50-100$ on the subway dancing, people don’t even make that in a week. After we did that my friend Andrew started making business cards, and with business cards came opportunities so we started getting calls for parties, etc. And it’s a team of elite dancers right here.
How do you guys feel when you’re performing?
Exuberant. When the W.A.F.F.L.E Crew performs, I feel like the best performance that comes from us is when we’re all together, so as many as the crew as possible. And when we perform it’s like the energy is at an all-time high, we feed off of each other, we don’t know what’s expected, we leave that room for us to perform and just be ourselves and do what each individual does best, so that way we feed off of each other and those energies transfer and it creates one big energy for the people to feel and understand.
When we know we are all together as the W.A.F.F.L.E Crew to perform, we know we’re bringing that energy, bringing that high level intensity, the unexpected, the things that people never saw before so it always feels good to be able to bring that energy at the highest level when most of us are together. That’s what you can expect and it’s fun because you look at people’s faces and you watch people be like, WOW, even on the subways they didn’t expect us to do a great show, they think it’s the same old and that our crew is just different.
How do you use your platform to inspire change?
We look to inspire change around us by just doing what we didn’t see as we were growing up. We are still growing up but we have all these opportunities to figure out ways to give back and do things that we weren’t able to do or people didn’t do for us when we were coming up, when we first started dancing. So now 10+ years in, we look for any and every opportunity to be able to go “oh, they never did that for us”, let’s do that for the younger generation, let’s do that for the younger dancers that are inspired by us.
We use our platform to inspire change by putting out positive content. We put out great videos that just put a smile on your face. If I know you’re having a bad day and I put out a good video with the guys and that makes you smile, that might change your day and how everything is going for you. I see people comment that all the time: “wow you guys are amazing, you made me smile, you changed my day, you guys made my day”. That’s what we do it for.
What impact do you want to have on your community?
The type of impact I want on my community is change. We do positive things by dancing and coming out and giving back. I want to inspire the younger generation to do the same, because people didn’t do that for me. When we used to go to these dance events, we would just go to get our name up. Now W.A.F.F.L.E makes a big enough name that when we throw dance events, we have the opportunity to give young kids, for example, some shoes. We just want to bring positivity and spread that light to everybody that’s coming up.
We want to inspire change because growing up we all didn’t have the same leadership or the same guidance that some people had so we just want to give back and show people that there’s more than one route that you can take to achieve your dreams. No one believed in entrepreneurship when I was growing up. So now, coming from where we came from, dance and this journey has been an amazing view of the world where we get to express ourselves and show people that this is what we do. We get to show the world and now we get to enjoy our life over something that was just a hobby to us growing up, so we just want to show the world that if you want to do it, you can chase your dreams, you can become someone important in the lane that you want to be in - it doesn’t have to be corporate, it doesn’t have to be medical. Just follow your heart and you will find happiness.
What do you mean to each other?
These are my brothers, it’s all in the name: We Are Family For Life.
W.A.F.F.L.E is one big family. We’ve been through everything together. Everybody here, we’ve known each other since we were kids. We grew up together. We’ve been through it all together. We’ve been through thick and thin. We argue, we fight, but at the end of the day everybody knows it’s all love.
I think we learn a lot from each other. We learn from our mistakes and that just means we have our head straight, we’re all on the right path, and we all want better for each other not just for ourselves. And this is a great example of what that’s like, cause we’ve all been through the worst situations, we’ve had ups and downs, we fought each other, we smile, we laugh together, and it’s just about embracing each other as human beings because, you know, we are all strong individuals, we all come with strong personalities, and we can bump heads, that’s all part of being human. There’s rights and wrongs and it’s always about how you correct your wrongs at the end of the day. We’ve been together 10+ years, we’re all on the right path and I love these idiots.
W.A.F.F.L.E means exactly what it says, We Are Family For Life Entertainment, plus, a little bit of drama. But you know, it’s all good on this side, we move like family for real. It’s like real siblings here, like real brothers.
