Kyran Taylor: Finding the Beat to Dance Again

It’s 5 a.m., and dew still lines the windows of his dormitory – a tiptoe around a maze of Jordans to not wake up his roommate Jaden is part of a daily ritual. Nobody else is awake, no voices can be heard except the crack and sizzle of breakfast that breaks the air – one that has become so dear to Kyran Taylor.

Egg yolk stains the marble counters, this isn’t a flawless routine, but one born out of necessity, an autonomous process. A crack of six eggs isn’t sufficient so waterboarding them with milk is the next step on the agenda.

Yet Taylor is lactose intolerant.

“By any means necessary,” he says, “I was skinny, thin, my older friends would wrap their hands around my bicep to mock me so I gave them nothing to laugh about.”

Undergoing a 30-pound transformation over 18 months has made Taylor obsessed with his bathroom mirror.

He lays his meal on the table brushing off the remnants of last night’s takeaway, opening his laptop to Adobe Lightroom whilst emulsifying his scrambled eggs in Heinz ketchup with his stomach letting off ripples of defiance.

An hour or so passes, and with breakfast complete, Taylor turns his full attention to Lightroom, photos he’s taken illuminate the darkness of his living room.

Two years ago, Taylor wasn’t a photographer, now awake at 6 a.m. - deary eyes and dark spots beneath them stare into the minute details of a Carolina blue jersey.

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“It was a journey of some sort coming here, so I needed a camera to document what I’m getting up to,” said Taylor, “since a long way back, I wanted to see if I could do YouTube and vlogging and I had an angle now. A Brit takes the deep south of the United States.”

The University of North Carolina is one stoked with a large international student base, within which a small minority of British people exist, with Taylor being one of them.

It’s a decision that is best described as daring, a peculiar pathway for someone who could’ve gone to one of the best universities in the world.

“There’s a linear pathway most take in England but I’m not most people,” said Taylor, “high school, sixth form, university, job, I couldn’t fall into the chain of events without truly understanding myself.”

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The first son to a single mother, with a younger brother eleven years his junior, Taylor accelerated his growth as an adult. There was a gap left by a vacant father Taylor moulded himself to fit.

“The added responsibility made me oriented, I couldn’t just exist knowing the struggles a single parent goes through and just be idle.” Taylor said, “the first job I got was at 16, lifting boxes for a supermarket struggling for 8 hours a day, I wasn’t an entrepreneur straight out the gate, but I wasn’t useless either.”

This mantra of responsibility siphoned into his education, a doctrine of “just get it done” and a lack of procrastination built into Taylor by his mother Maria.

“Doing well in school is the easiest way to make an African parent happy, so why not just do it,” Taylor said jokingly.

This innate desire to do was an unquenchable need Maria had to fill, “I contemplated taking the sofas out of the house because Kyran would never sit down,” Maria said, a reminiscent laugh chopped the sentence, “He’d stand two inches in front of the TV glaring with a lollipop stuck between his teeth.”

“I’d tell him to move back but he wouldn’t listen, he’s a stubborn boy, it's why he probably has to put his contacts into his eyes every morning.”

Taylor didn’t have the prototypical interests a lad from England would have, he wasn’t glued to the spindle of a chair watching Premier League football – nor was he involved in the tribalism you witness with any other sport. He would run home from school to watch the 5 pm viewings of his favourite anime Dragon Ball Z, Maria would attempt to discourage from the big grey box – turning on the music channel playing today’s top hits.

“Most days music filled the house, it's just how I liked it,” said Maria. “At first, Kyran would go up to his room to go play Xbox or do his homework but suddenly around the age of eight he started dancing.”

“At first it was probably to annoy me, he’d slither into the kitchen contorting his body in ways I told him off for because it looked unhealthy, but eventually he found some rhythm, and he became pretty good.”

His first street dance lesson was where Taylor met his best friend Moh Basin, they trod a very similar path both in life and dancing. They would go on to perform at various Skepta sets, dancers for Chris Brown, the Royal Albert Hall for multiple concerts and even showing off some acting chops in a cameo for a Netflix hit show.

“With dancing and the occasional acting, Kyran and I got into circles and places you wouldn’t dream of in London,” said Basin.

Excelling in a world of culture, and excelling in academics, Taylor was now 16 years old and applying to universities. He had the grades, the extracurriculars and the suave to navigate an interview, with that, Taylor applied to the University of Oxford and got in.

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One winter’s night returning from dance practice in Central London, Taylor and Basin were met with a situation out of their control.

“They always used to talk about pathetic fallacy in English class at school, I would lead off with that whenever I had to analyse Macbeth, I didn’t know it was a real thing,” Basin says, though not angry his cadence slowly shifts – darkening before he speaks again.

“It was a tough day; it was cold, and we just wanted to get home. Sirens were just blaring constantly like the city was on fire. It felt like someone was following us, I mean look there were multiple people on the streets, so we didn’t think nothing of it to be checking over our shoulders.”

In a blur, four men in black circled in front of them, balaclavas draped over their faces. They began to shout, voices muffled from the cloth, “Where you from, don’t waste time, empty your pockets now.”

“Kyran wanted to resist, but they roughed us up taking any valuables we had, one stood guard with a knife shouting at us to hurry up,” said Basin. “After they ran, and the onlookers who stood frozen in the step on the other side of the road walked on, only one person came to see if we were ok.”

“From that point on, Kyran grew up, he didn’t dance anymore and both of us just didn’t want to be here.”

A metropolitan bustling with opportunity turned sordid for Taylor, the glass skyline of London was replaced with a brutalist umbra that choked him every time he left the house and entered its streets.

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The thought of America always intrigued him, the Land of Opportunity they say. A grounding responsibility to both his mother Maria and his younger brother and a spot at one of the best universities in the world anchored him in England, but there was always that unquenchable thirst to be different, to do.

Both he and Basin under the guidance of The Sutton Trust, an educational charity that aims to assist in social and educational mobility amongst disadvantaged backgrounds began to apply to universities in the States.

Taylor sought his eyes on three places that completely contrasted London, the University of North Carolina, the University of Miami, and Princeton.

“I was accepted into Miami, Princeton let's skip that one,” Taylor said, “Chapel Hill was

always the landing spot for me especially when I got a Morehead scholarship.”

Summer 2022, Taylor arrived on campus. He had glasses at this point, big opaque frames and twists tied up at the back. A Sony camera that he bought wrapped around his neck. To Taylor, it was an expedition to the unknown with that growing responsibility and umbra discarded.

“I first met Kyran in the pit, he had this colour-coded blue fit on and his camera,” said Jaden, a friend of Taylor’s whilst at UNC.

“Freshman year he is in the pit a lot with his camera, interviewing people for his YouTube channel. He’d ask you to guess the UK slang, he had Caleb Love on his channel a lot or sometimes just used his camera to interact with everyone, we’ve reached a point where everyone knows Kyran.”

“I arrived on campus, still my serious self, that was still my persona,” said Taylor, “I realised pretty quickly that’s just not how you do college over here.”

Maria understood the drawbacks of having her son on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, but she resonates with knowing he’s happy.

“He calls me all the time, checking in and his younger brother and me whilst telling me all these stories, I’m glad he can be that little kid dancing in front of the TV again,” Maria said.

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One of the most memorable experiences of freshman year for Taylor was Live Action, a casual sports fan, that night in the Dean Dome was a type of epiphany.

“I’m not proud, I was fanboying hard, videoing Deja Kelly’s intro, taking flicks courtside to post on Instagram, yeah not my proudest moments especially considering where we are now.”

Now close friends with Deja Kelly, RJ Davis and many others on the basketball team, Taylor is ever-present courtside at UNC games.

“I began taking my camera to games freshman year and just casually taking pictures. Over a few months, I got better at it and made a separate Instagram account to post them, eventually Deja dm’ed me to photograph her for a Tommy Hilfiger shoot and now I’m the official photographer for the Women’s team.”

From this, Taylor has created a business taking pictures in the Research Triangle, from grad shoots to Elliot Cadeau training reels, his photography and videography have gained notoriety on campus, finally an entrepreneur.

Taylor still sits in front of his laptop, eyes now watering from the lack of sleep. He’s finished editing the images of Kelly and has sent them to her. An episode of the anime now plays whilst he gets his final meal for Suhoor. A recent revert to the religion of Islam, Taylor practices Ramadan till April 9.

Whilst the workload may be overwhelming to some, Taylor thrives under such responsibility. A balance between growing up and enjoying to dance is something Kyran Taylor has found in Chapel Hill.

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