Last time I wrote about Liverpool FC, the futbol club with the most passionate fans in the world →You Will Never Walk Alone.
You’ll remember from the hip-hop post that the culture is not just the music (rapping + DJing i.e. mixing or creating or scratching beats). There’s four elements and dancing is one of them. At it’s base b-boying is the hip-hop dance, the original hip-hop dance.
Also I’m saying b-boying but it’s a gender neutral term, girls that breakdance are referred to as b-girls. “Break dancing” is how it’s more known to the general public. “Break” because hip-hop started as a “break” in the music structure. People just say “I’m breakin” when they’re talking about dancing.
I don’t have the best rhythm, or rather I’m usually just to stiff and stifled. So when I stared dabbling with dance a few years ago, it was mostly just to loosen up a little bit. I took dance — trying out “choreo”, house, intending to learn some basic Latin, and then breakdance which was the throwaway experiment.
I couldn’t stick with Latin, because the music just didn’t move me, and then also Latin clubs are way too intimidating. Those that know me know I’m rather terrified of Latin dancing — your salsa, and bachatas, and merengues. I‘m just way to awkward to do it right. Then especially if you’re a guy and you cannot lead, then it’s hard to get good enough to lead because no one is dancing with you over the smooth cassanovas if you’re not super good, and if you’re not super good then, you see the spiral….
With choreo and house I felt having to remember the steps and sequences to be a little distracting from just letting my body respond to the music. This is where breakin’ was a revelation. It’s the dance style that I ended up taking to the most!
I’ve continued to dable in it ever since. It’s the one that has given me (relative) confidence in at least being ok to stand on the dancefloor — understand I’m not saying I’m doing performances, or wowing people at clubs in dance circles— just that I’m
The dance tends to be very young, it’s harder to find older heads like myself that still actively are partaking in the art. Part of it is because for most people they just lose the time to devote to practice.
Sure, it’s often an aggressive dance— and just like battling in rap music, the “battle” is part of it’s history. However, it’s not all about battling. It’s also not all about the tricks. There’s actually a debate about this within the community, the idea of style vs power. Powemoves being the crazy acrobatic tricks that wow and fill stadiums. Style being more of the reminder that at the end of the day its’ a dance, and we still need to top rock. It’s an interesting albeit insiderish debates that every sub-culture ends up having.
So here’s why I’m enamored with b-bboying.
- it’s the only dance that happens on four levels (click for examples) → on the ground (threading), crouching (footwork), standing up (footwork), and in the air (power moves/leaps). If you add the deliberate poses (freezes), you could argue that’s a fifth level.
- it’s the most liberating: Beyond the basic steps (six-step, three-step, shuffle, etc) you can literally do whatever you want, provided you’re staying on beat. Anything, no rules!
- it’s “original” music is funk along with East coast boom-bap style hip-hop, the style of hip-hop I grew up with.
- it borrows from everything. Salsa, Kung-Fu, Capioera, YOGA! It borrows from everything. In that way it’s like hip-hop music, which chops, samples and scratches anything and everything.
- it can work at many speeds. Sure you often dance it fast, like in cyphers and battles but you can dance it slow almost like a tai-chi type of meditation. If you listened to the track at the top of this post, you can get a sense of how chill the tempo can be — main thing is that underlying boom-bap-boom-bap drumbeat, but you can layer all sorts of things on it.
- if you’re into being a global citizen, it’s the dance that has been taken up globally the most. It’s everywhere. In fact, you go places like Korea, Russia, German and France, and they are in many ways even closer to the original b-boys than American cities. Everybody everywhere b-boys.
I get that life is not lived backwards, and I do try my best not to be one of those “life regrets” people, but I do wish I’d have started bboying in my mid-20s to have been able to devote time to this wonderful dance and to have been part of the community, but cela vita. If I ever have kids, this would be one extra curricular I’d definitely get them into this.
Street Art of the Day — A Mural dedicated to a B-Boy (Seattle, USA)
