We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Lexi Young a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Lexi, thanks for joining us today. Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?

Strut The Yard is a riff off of the 2007 film, Stomp The Yard, a classic Black dance/stepping film I carry worn memories of seeing from over and over from the chairs of hairdressers as I swerved the hotcomb or when my Auntie Slyvia would burn incense and throw on a *whispers* PG -13 movie.

It felt right as a name for this silent disco project/company/mutual aid community experiment, in many ways it is a very dated film, however the themes around Black joy and frustration, community, dancing, stepping are powerful.

I had originally been playing around with a few different names – it was difficult to come up with a name that captured the vibe and blossoming vision I had for this. For a while I was particularly into the idea of Ephemeral Flights, trying to capture how fleeting the events could be (shout out to my friend Martin for co-creating that one). I was smitten by the idea of playing around with calling the events “Flights”, but something just never quite sat right.

Then it just hit me upside the head while I was sitting in the living room talking to my wife, Em.
“STOMP THE YARD”, I said excitedly, “Remember that movie?”

I sat with it and “stomp” didn’t feel quite right. I appreciated its history as part of the movie title and connection to stepping, but it wasn’t…it. I

I wanted something that felt bold, that insinuated that we would take up space, that felt expressive.

That’s when I thought of Strut The Yard. It fit.

That was more than a year ago I think? I didn’t want to bust onto the scene, coming off as this Yankee trying to bring New York City to to Durham. Hell no, respecting this community and become a part of it is my priority.

So, while I held this idea and shared it with some folks in the community – all I wanted to do was go dancing, check out the Fruit flea markets, go hiking by the Eno, get used to shopping at Food Lion, root down.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My story is not a linear one at all. It’s more like a graph and a spiral mashed into one. Silent disco…how did I get interested in exploring a side of nightlife/rave culture that is still so new?

A little about me and my positionality: I am a mixed Black femme. I use they/she pronouns and am on a journey into loving my queer, Black self. I was raised by the mountains and the heat of San Diego, California – the land of droughts and no seasons. Stunning beaches and lush palm trees.

I was raised around communities of dance and entertainment. My mom was in charge of two dance companies, my dad a DJ and photographer (and former actor/director). Me and my 3 younger siblings were raised in a creative home. I spent hours in rehearsal rooms jamming to Usher or Justin Timberlake, watching incredible BIPOC dancers learn intricate dance routines as I caught up on my English homework. I sat with my dad at his events, helping set up speakers, lighting – watching him mix music to keep parents and kids alike on the dance floor.

Of course for most of my childhood I wasn’t super into what my parents did – I wanted to be on stage! I wanted to tell stories, explore human psychology, I wanted to sing and dance. I wanted to collaborate and create something that would make people laugh, cry, think. I wanted to be like Barbra Streisand or Audra McDonald. Singing great songs, telling great stories, and having a fabulous time doing it.

My parents were very clear with me that money would be hard to come by as an artist, that the life would be hard – but if it made me happy and if I worked hard for it that’s all that mattered. So, I threw myself headfirst into pursuing theater as a career at a pretty young age, around 13. My parents sacrificed a lot and bartered services for my classes, I attended a charter school so I could have the flexibility I needed, applied for scholarships for summer workshops and winter masterclasses.

The recession hit my family really hard and I burrowed myself deeper into theater.

I was auditioning and getting rejected. I was auditioning and booking shows. A few years later at 16 I signed with an agent. I entered musical theater competitions and won some, I got nominated and won an award at the local National Youth Arts Awards one year.

I worked on operas, plays, musicals. Professional, regional, community, youth theater, you name it.

I was in it! I got a scholarship for the music theater program at Oklahoma City University and was thrilled to be going to the same school as Kelli O’Hara and Kristin Chenoweth.

Well. One semester of the racism and sexism I experienced at that school and I took a train to NYC… with the intention of coming back.

I did not.

What followed was a series of trauma and triumph. I became homeless, I experienced the shelter system, I was sexually assaulted. I fell in love with the city. I fell in love with a boy. I booked my first contract out of NYC with Disney Cruise Lines. I worked and lived with over 1,400 employees on that ship for 7 months. As an American and a Mainstage Performer I was paid well, given great benefits, and my own cabin. I met countless other employees from other countries like Haiti and Jamaica, working in the galley, being paid poorly, forced to sleep in small quarters with roommates, working unsustainable hours. That didn’t sit right with me.

I toured the country and Japan as a swing and understudy with the musical RENT. I saw a lot of nooks and crannies of the U.S. I witnessed deep poverty and opioid addictions, I experienced racism, I saw homophobia on full display some nights.

I felt how non-union performers are mistrusted and mistreated. I felt the toxicity of profit driven production companies working their stage crews to the bone and damaging the mental health of their young performers. The boy I fell in love with and I finally broke up for good, I began to clearly see the ills of the theater industry. What it demanded of people financially, physically, mentally. The #BroadwayBod campaigns and the pay to plays and the tokenization and the ineffective Actors Equity Union. I worked every odd job imaginable from retail, to babysitting, to dog walking, to house cleaning, to bartending, to restaurant work to support my theatrical dreams. I looked one way and saw the roles we were all expected to play, the inequity, the inequality, the lack of empathy. The 2016 election happened and Trump was elected to the highest political position in our country.

I was turning around the other way and seeing the level of police brutality and scales of incarceration my community was facing day in and day out in this country. The environment being extracted from, marine life being violently attacked, pipe lines being laid through Indigenous land against their stewards will.

It all built and built and burrowed inside of me. I fell in love again. I read Audre Lorde, I studied historical events my American education did not tell me about, I met the works of Joanna Macy and Thict Naht Hanh.

And then COVID hit and NYC locked down.

And in 2021, a dear friend of mine invited me to her birthday celebration hosted with What The Float.

What The Float is the inspiration and dance space that made me want to seed the roving dance adventure in the Triangle that is Strut The Yard. What The Float is a company that hosts floating dance/musical bar crawl type parties that take you through different parts of the 5 boroughs of NYC every month. You buy a ticket, you show up in comfortable shoes and maybe some glitter, you’re handed a comfortable pair of wireless headphones, and before you know it a leader with a glowing baton leads you and your dancing crew through the streets of NYC to dance, climb, and explore.

The What The Float community in NYC become a brave space for my wife and I to explore our gender identities and reclaim the streets of NYC through dance. Everything was done outside, making it COVID safe and with everyone given their own pair of headphones with control over their volume, it was sensory friendly.
It didn’t hurt that we were encouraged to twerk, frolic, climb, shimmy, dress up, dress down in whatever ways that felt right (as long as we wouldn’t fall and break a bone). It was blissful – interacting with our surrounding city with fun, playfulness, and joy. How damn magical to bypass sound ordinances, dance through parks, run through empty streets, turn alleyways into temporary dance clubs, climb trees to house music, dance under the stars to hip hop all while living in a world full of such grief, pain, and chaos.

In a world where our bodies are policed in so many ways, What The Float gave me a place to break away from the self judgement and discomfort of moving my body in public and reclaim my joy where and when I saw fit.

My wife and I carried that medicine here with us when we landed in the Triangle in 2022.

I cherish my community over at Float and also recognize the ways the space was overwhelmingly white and how I struggled to see myself or my community reflected there. In fact, most places I looked that centered Electronic Dance Music and House music such as festivals, ecstatic dance spaces, raves, and even regional Burning Man events were pretty much all predominantly white. Why was that? How did that happen, I wondered. Those questions took me down rabbit hole learning about the history of Disco and House music and the Detroit Techno scene. I learned more about the intergenerational trauma so many marginalized people carry when it comes to taking up space in public, being visible. The lack of safety or comfort so many of my Queer kin feel when it comes to joyously busting it down.

I learned about how rave culture and politics go hand in hand! That this culture is anti-establishment at its core and without politics, any form of raving has truly lost its soul.

I learned about how the AIDS epidemic wiped out so many creative, musical Queer Black elders resulting in such a non-diverse representation in the Dance Music world. I knew I wanted to make a dance space that acknowledged this truth, this history. But also, what a twist right? Creating something of an establishment with the desire to honor and uplift its anti-establishment roots? But if I wanted to pay QTBIPOC (Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, People of Color) creatives to collaborate on Strut The Yard experiences in the future and pay them living wages, I knew I’d need to work on building a company and filing an LLC, the whole nine yards.

When I was envisioning seeding a silent disco community in the area, I considered how I could honor what I experienced and learned from What The Float and also be honest about how I wanted this to be different from What The Float. I wanted to create a company that operates within a framework of pleasure activism and liberation for all beings, one that is unapologetically Queer, Black, and Brown. That celebrates and names how powerful and radical our joy is. Our joy, our dance, our movement – so simple and yet it is radical and challenges people.

We held our first Strut The Yard in September in Chapel Hill, and I was so humbled and thrilled by the reactions and feedback. For this event we uplifted the luminary work of Audre Lorde in our mixes, pushing the creative boundaries of spoken word, DJing, dance, exploration, and play all while honoring some incredible BIPOC artists new and old. We had some Lauryn Hill meeting Bad Bunny colliding with Tevin Campbell. It was a total blast, we had people on the sidewalk trying on headphones and jamming with us, but one cannot breeze past the learning lessons. Towards the middle of our event, I discovered that some of my participants were getting shot at with BB gun pellets resulting in bruises, my wife being one of them. We couldn’t figure where it was coming from and we had to usher our dancing posse into a less visible area. Thankfully what we do is so transient that we were in and out of the area within minutes.

Moving forward into building new Strut The Yard experiences this year, I continue to carefully consider how the guerilla nature of our events influences location choices, while reckoning with what it means to so visibly take up space as a QTBIPOC company.

My goal is for 20% percentage of profits to get fed back to the very community we aim to serve in our local area through mutual aid networks. I am passionate about the mission of dancing our butts off through the Triangle and that joy bringing in money to directly support QTBIPOC folks in the Triangle pay rent, get groceries, and other support. As a new business owner I am still learning how to navigate the “industry” while wanting to approach it in a brand new way. Ethical marketing, conscious connections, transparency, building a strong foundation to sustainably give to mutual aids – these are all aspects I’m learning about from my community through mistakes, feedback, successes, and interaction.

I want to make the space as financially accessible as possible and have adopted a sliding scale/mutual aid ticket system. I wanted the space to center music by BIPOC artists and producers and have a standard of highlighting mixes with diverse people, knowing that the mainstream EDM and House space is predominantly male and white. I wanted the space to uplift and center QTBIPOC participants with their joy and safety at the center of all that we do, especially living in the South East – from how we select public routes to holding a space of non-judgement and expression. All are welcome here, but we ask that all participants remember we do not tolerate racism, queerphobia, transphobia, antisemitism, Islamophobia, or any other forms of hate. This is a space curated and created by QTBIPOC folks FOR QTBIPOC folks.

Lastly, there is something powerful about changing your relationship to the world around you through dance and music. You know that big Car Wash spot near the Cat Cafe in Chapel Hill? Yeah, we decided to dance around to the iconic song “Car Wash” by Rose Royce in front of it before dancing across the street to Beyonce. Suddenly, that car wash isn’t just another place you spend money and run an errand – it’s a spot filled with a memory of laughter and dance. It’s taking you through a story – a story of the area, of the world we aim to build and fight for where we can hold the grief with the joy. In a time where have the ability to bear witness to the multiple genocides happening across the planet and fight to stop them, we need spaces to move our bodies in joy, anger, grief, excitement, release.

It is deeply important to me that Strut The Yard integrates with the communities in the Triangle in a way that honors the vibrant and bad ass existing Queer and BIPOC dance spaces such as The Pinhook in Durham or Legends in Raleigh, while offering a totally new experience.

It was and does continue to be important to me that Strut The Yard isn’t simply an attempt to recreate a NYC experience in the Triangle. For me, it’s about approaching the community with accessibility, respect….and maybe a little mischief. It’s about dancing on your own under the stars or perhaps making a lot of new friends or finally getting to dance proudly down the sidewalk with other glowing people.

My hope is that once you experience Strut The Yard, it opens something inside of you, something fun and weird.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

I think the thing that “non-creatives” struggle to understand or deal with is actually the very thing that feeds the journey of any creative – being terrible at something first. (I truly don’t believe any is REALLY not creative.)

I know, I know. It can feel like the most unrewarding and disappointing part of approaching anything creative. As someone who was raised around creative energy and has had creativity be such a cornerstone of my life professionally and otherwise, I can’t emphasize the importance of screwing up enough.

Screw up! Screw up nice and big and good and keep going!

Whether it’s acting, singing, embroidery, the guitar, playing around with music mixes, poetry. I am one of the corny ones who deeply believes we are all creative at heart and cannot recommend the book “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron enough. That’s where I learned about spilling my consciousness onto a page and taking myself out on “Artist Dates”, something anyone can do even if you are a broke actor like I was.

Some of us were encouraged to explore our creativity and some of us weren’t. Some of us had support and some of us didn’t. Many of us were told that creativity needs to result in beauty and profit for it to be meaningful. In my eyes, that couldn’t be more WRONG.

When I was a full time professional singer/actor – my ultimate favorite part of the theatrical process was the rehearsal process. It’s where you can (and should be able to) mess up loudly and proudly. It’s where you test out different ideas and character mannerisms. Where you mess up lines and dance steps and maybe discover something new. It’s where you can look like a total doofus and come away a bit humbled, ready to try again.

I carry that with me in my creative processes and often have to remind myself of it, that it is okay to be “bad” at something. Is it fun? Do you want to try it? Have you always thought it could be cool to know what it feels like to write a story or carve something out of wood? Just start and be terrible and have fun and keep being terrible, maybe you learn from some masters, eventually technique develops. Your own flavor, your own philosophy.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

A Written Recipe of my current mission driving my creative journey:

1 1/2 Cups of Honoring the way Queer BIPOC people have always challenged what is considered “acceptable” dance and movement in the world.

2 Cups of Returning back to the groovy, funky roots of House, Techno, Electronic music that sprouted in predominantly Black gay dance clubs in Detroit, Chicago, and NYC alike in the 70’s.

3 Diced Bunches of Reclaiming our ancestral joy and practice of dancing with the land, offering our hip shaking to the paved streets, empty parking lots, rushing rivers, pine trees.

You knead all of that for about 2 minutes until a soft dough forms. Portion that dough out into about 19 little balls. Flatten each one with a tortilla press, fry it in oil for 30 seconds on each side, flipping about 3 times until crispy and golden. Serve immediately. Each one drives my creative journey a bit further.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://struttheyard.webflow.io/
• Instagram: @struttheyard

Image Credits
Still waiting on permissions from photographer for photos and double checking that we have full permission from those photographed. I appreciate your patience. Will I be able to send via email or submit them another way by the 15th? ^ this is a glitch, I wrote it a few days ago when I emailed you and meant to submit. Now I am unable to delete it for whatever reason. I would like to provide image credit to the final photo I uploaded under Chelsea Hope, What The Float NYC