The imperfect symmetry of twin dancers Billy and Bobby McClain has been captivating audiences around the world for the past 35 years. With a love for movement, hip-hop, and altruism, The Wondertwins have performed with and choreographed and written for some of music’s biggest names. From their first street crews in Boston to their continued success at the Apollo Theatre, their unique style honors dancing’s past by weaving together new combinations of techniques from Vaudeville to tap and beyond. Today, the duo’s performances reflect their favorite moments growing up in the glamorous, socially conscious, and innovative days of hip-hop. In addition to educating audiences, they educate the youth as public high-school teachers and directors for the Project RISE program in Boston. Their latest show, “To Hip Hop with Love,” is a testament to the genre’s evolution, and the brothers will bring it to The Dance Hall in Kittery, Maine, on Saturday, Oct. 24. The Sound caught up with Billy McClain by phone to discuss tough decisions, the role of hip-hop dance today, and their experience on “America’s Got Talent.”
How did you get started in dance?
We joined the first Boston street-dance professional performers when we were 10 and we’ve just been keeping it steady since then. And even though we’re full-time dancers, we still find time to make sure that we give back to the community as teachers and community leaders.
How do you give back to the community?
We actually have a … performing arts and academic summer camp that we’ve been running for 22 years called Project RISE. We get around 130 kids from the inner city and provide them with extra help in the academic areas of the school that they’re in, usually math, science, English, and history and we also have a performing arts component to it. So it’s like a school day with performing arts in the afternoon. I haven’t had a break yet, it’s been 22 years in a row. My brother is the dance arts teacher of a middle school and high school at Josiah Quincy Upper School and I am the disciplinarian of the schools.
You were recruited to play Division 1 college basketball; that must have been a difficult decision to make.
Yeah, we were being looked at by several schools like Boston College, a number of Division II schools and a couple of big Division I schools; we were standout athletes at Lincoln Sudbury High School. We were looking into prep schools like Cushing Academy and Wilbraham and Monson, and Hyde Prep School — this was during our senior year. But we also still had the love for dance and we didn’t play basketball for the first two years of high school because we wanted to make sure we’d keep on performing and doing shows and we knew basketball would take away from it. Our 11th grade year, that’s when we decided that we wanted to play basketball, but at the same time we were missing the performance element of dance. And even though we were kind of fancy basketball players, that was our way of performing. But after high school we just had to make a decision what we felt comfortable with and you know, with basketball, we need three other players, you’re not going to win with two players, it doesn’t matter how good they are, you still need that supporting cast. With dance, we just felt like we didn’t have to depend on anyone, we can just depend on each other. Plus, we were young, 17 years old, so I think there was a little fear factor with basketball. We just felt more comfortable pursuing dance. So right out of high school, we really pursued it and just hustled and hustled and auditioned.
How do you choreograph? What’s the process?
We’re fans of so many styles of dance. We’re fans of Broadway and hip-hop dance, of course — that’s the area we came up in — and musicals, so we watch a lot of dance. What we’re trying to do is create what we saw when we were younger: Broadway, the color, the lights, the creativity, and just the mood of dance. So when we start to think about what type of show we’re gonna do, it’s a form of paying homage to the things that made us love dance so much when we were younger. Shows like “Soul Train,” those type of shows that we would just get up in the morning and just watch them repeatedly and watch how they move, watch their interactions, all that played a part in how we create our shows now.
People believe there’s an emotional or even physical connection between twins. How does that affect your process and performance?
For us, it’s our 35th year dancing together. So sometimes we don’t need to choreograph anything; our natural movements come from our halves as twins and just being around each other so much. The cool thing about us is that because we’re twins, if we’re into something that’s not choreographed, something about it looks like it is because we look alike. There’s parts in our show that we just put the music on and we’ll listen to it over and over again and we don’t plan what we’re going to do and just allow it to happen. We do that a lot in our show; we just let the music happen and we’re just vibe to it and see what happens. It keeps that excitement and not makes it so it has to be here and there and there.
How much of that happens because you’re twins?
A lot of it. I could say all of it, but I don’t want to say that. Definitely because we’re twins and we live together, we have the same love for music and movement. People think we dance exactly the same but we don’t. We have a different way of moving, we just make sure our timing is the same. Our hands are sometimes off, our legs are sometimes off, but we don’t really stress it because, emotionally, we’re different people. As far as feelings, we have different experiences even though we’re twins. Yeah, that emotional connection and that twin-ship happens a lot with the music naturally.
What or who inspires you in dance?
We’re big fans of tap dance, we do a little bit, but we’re actually learning tap. One of the reasons we’ve always loved tap are the Nicholas Brothers. We watched them and all these different brothers, brothers of dance — the Hines brothers, the Berry brothers, the Condos brothers. One of things that we love about them, even though they’re on time, they’re not the exact same. Sometimes with us, because we do a lot of robot dancing and a lot of animation style movements, the easiest thing for us is to look the exact same. So that’s one of the reasons why we don’t use mirrors. If we use mirrors when we dance we’ll end up dancing the exact same and that’s not for us. We like the movements to be different if they’re supposed to be different. That freedom, it’s almost like it’s freestyle choreography.
It’s definitely those dancers that really inspire me. We go to New York sometimes just to walk down the street and watch. There’s certain companies that are going to be at this theatre — all those things excite us because that’s one of our goals is to be at these places, that’s been one of our goals, to perform on Broadway, something we’ve never done. So what we do is try to bring the Broadway into our performance. Sometimes you have to do that, you have to act like you’re in a place to feel like that at that place. We’ve been blessed to do the Apollo Theatre 16 times and had our names on the marquee and that was one of our goals before, growing up was to see our name in lights at the Apollo and we had a chance to do that and see it for an entire week. Right after that was over we were looking for something else to bring that same energy to keep us motivated. It’s hard to stay motivated when you’ve been dancing for 35 years. We know a lot of dancers that we grew up with who aren’t dancing at all. They’re just surprised when they see us and they’re like, “I can’t believe you guys are still dancing!” and I always say, “I can’t believe you’re NOT dancing!” (laughs).
I was just watching fi