We are proud to present Fysh N Chick’s Taeko Carroll of America’s Best Dance Crew as one of our guest judges for Battle Royale.

Taeko Carroll was raised in two completely different cultures: Japanese and American. As a result her spoken Japanese is as fluent as her English. As a child Taeko was an athlete. She began gymnastics at age three, and baseball, softball, soccer, tennis, swimming, and track and field were all to come.

Sports played a great part in molding the person she is today, but music and dance had an equally great role in her life. She played piano for 10 years and the violin at a semi-professional level for 9 years. Ballet began at age 11 (rigorous training in the English Royal Ballet style), and she began taking singing and acting lessons in high school. But of all the arts, dance was the most impacting. Since Taeko’s mom is a dancer who specializes in Macedonian and other forms of Balkan folk dancing, Taeko was learning to move to exotic rhythms pretty much as soon as she learned to walk. Throughout a lifetime of dance she has trained in many different styles: Balkan and Japanese folk dance; ballet; jazz; modern; and tap. She has done Vietnamese and Turkish dancing, Armenian and Israeli, Romanian and Croatian. In effect, she has danced the world, but her heart landed forever in American hip hop.

In the summer of ’05, Taeko moved to North Hollywood to pursue her dream of becoming a professional hip hop dancer. Life there started out slow but by Jan of ’07 the future was beginning to look brighter. She had begun subbing at the Millennium Dance Complex, teaching ballet and beginning hip hop. She also joined one of LA’s finest hip hop dance companies, Phlex Productions. In the summer of ’07, she spent 3 months traveling back and forth between Las Vegas and LA, working full time as a Las Vegas Pussy Cat Doll go-go dancer.

Toward the end of ’07, Phlex Productions began preparing two crews to audition for the upcoming 1st season of what was to become MTV’s hit show America’s Best Dance Crew (ABDC). One of the crews was a co-ed crew named Phlex Productions (PP); the other was an all-girl crew you might have heard of called Fysh n Chicks. Unfortunately, PP didn’t’ make the final cut onto the show but Fysh n Chicks did, making it to the final 5 on the show’s 1st season. As of now, Taeko is working on developing her music career (both instrumental and vocal) and getting the two companies she is involved with, The Yuri and Taeko Show with Kaba Modern’s Yuri Tag and Phlex Productions, up and running.

Taeko and Yuri Tag Choreography