NEW YORK — The Financial District skyscrapers’ thousands of windows light up like disco balls. In an art gallery in the Brooklyn docks, a DJ wearing a baseball cap plays hip-hop music, with vibrant bass, frantic drums, acid and groove melodies, in a R&B and house atmosphere. On the floor, Davy Wreck improvises an acrobatic and paced dance between four tape strips that form a five-meter square. The multiracial 30-year-old with a bun starts with some tap dance (in sneakers), before acrobatically flipping onto one arm, his legs doing the splits in the air.
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This is breakdancing. The dancer twists on his back and on his head before freezing — on beat — into a muscular figure, drawing cheers from the audience that surrounds the square. Some spectators extend their arms as a sign of praise, almost touching the breaker, who gets back up in a flawless jump and joins back the small crowd, radiating a certain coolness that he most certainly worked on.
It’s tempting to paraphrase Miles Davis, when he was speaking about jazz: hip-hop is not just music, it’s an attitude. A spectator-dancer steps in; it’s his minute to shine, being successively agile, powerful, insolent, spectacular and sexy.
Roots in the Bronx
Hip-hop has its roots a few blocks away, in the low-income Bronx, in the 1970s. James Brown is heating up the disco floor, and Black and Latinos are crafting a funk dance that draws on salsa, the martial arts of capoeira and kung fu. In the middle of the song, the melodic instruments go silent and the drums start a breakbeat. It’s the moment of glory for breakdancers, known as b-boys and b-girls.
At the beginning of this movement — then called “rocking” — it is the opportunity to challenge an opposing gang without any bloodshed: a “sublimation of fight into dance,” explains Dick Hebdige, a British sociologist specialized in the study of subcultures. These dancers gather at block parties with a DJ, do graffiti and wear satin baggy tracksuits, Adidas — and then Puma — sneakers, colorful glasses, bucket hats or backwards baseball caps. This urban culture will soon conquer the world.
“It speaks to me! Something happens in my body, a crazy reaction. I feel animated, electrified.”
Walid Boumhani, a French hip-hop figure, fell in love with this culture in 1984, when American films Beat Street and Breakin’ were released, and the French network TF1 began to broadcast the cult TV show H.I.P H.O.P., with Sidney, the country’s first Black presenter. A whole generation identified with him. “It speaks to me! Something happens in my body, a crazy reaction, but I’m not intellectualizing anything. I feel animated, electrified,” Walid says.
Self-taught, he learned about popping, a jerky and wavy dance. “I watched films, TV, and I went to parties. It was very spontaneous, it was mimicry: we imitated two or three movements, and reproduced them in clubs or in the school cafeteria, without mirrors or lexicons,” says Walid, who grew up in the Paris suburbs.
With other dancers, he found a place where he trained every weekend and exchanged tapes of music videos from MTV. As young adults, they went to clubs and practiced hype, which draws inspiration from American and African-American dances from New York and California.
In 1996, Walid met a Japanese man who gave him VHSs of Japanese music videos. The French globetrotter roamed the clubs of Guinea, playing the latest hits from the U.S., and listening to emerging sounds, such as gangsta funk, Afro jazz and electro. Other subgenres liven up his galaxy of sounds and moves, such as ghettotech (Detroit), grime (London), nerdcore (for nerds), hipster hop (which is reminiscent of indie rock) or even Mongolian rap (more discreet).
The breakdance battle, the peak of spectacle
“Twenty years ago, everything happened in clubs, you had to know this or that person to get their tapes. Half an hour of music video was precious. Today, everything is accessible on the internet, and that creates something else,” says Walid, who was the first foreigner to win a battle in the United States, the B-Boy Summit in Pasadena, California in 2000. Until then parties were improvised in the streets of Paris’s Châtelet and La Défense districts. “Then things got organized, united,” he says.
The ultimate institutionalization: the introduction of breakdance at the Paris Olympics Games this summer. On Aug. 9 and 10, 16 b-boys and 16 b-girls will compete in one-on-one battles on the Place de la Concorde. The battle is the pinnacle of the show and the subject of several international competitions like the USA Hip Hop Dance Championship, Juste Debout (Paris) or Summer Dance Forever (Amsterdam).
In Rennes, in western France, the Engrenages association has organized a competition at a local theater, in the working-class Blosne district. On stage, some 40 dancers sit on either side of three judges, comfortably settled in vintage armchairs: Walid; Lockadelic, a former dancer for Lady Gaga; and Fresh Seiji, a Japanese breakdancer who has traveled from The Netherlands. In the center: the dance square.
The MC, who’s in charge of warming up the audience and introducing the dancers, jokes around and selects at random the chosen ones who will battle one another — young teenagers and adults who come from France, Hong Kong, Ghana and even Gabon. The two dancers stand on opposite sides of the square and the DJ, who overlooks the stage behind the judges, starts the music.
After a few seconds of reflection, one of the performers decides to jump in for a minute, have fun and sweat a little. Sometimes, one mimes a story, with a hint of humor. When his turn comes, the opponent enters the square, the other leaves and, at the end, the jury shows the winner by pointing to him.
What does the jury evaluate exactly? “First, if the dancer is in tempo, on beat or offbeat. Then, musicality: if he or she plays with vocals, bass, drums. Pop is based on rhythm, so we look at angles, rapid coordinations, explosive muscle reaction. Third is the proposal: whether the dancer changes texture and avoids repetitions. Finally, we look at the contestant’s presence,” Walid says.
The same DNA despite the blending of different styles
The popping winner of the day is Joël Brown. The tall 29-year-old man of Ghanaian origin is a specialist in popping and locking, which involves “putting the music on your body, with effects and jerky, paused and slowed movements,” he says. But he likes to try all kinds of styles.
“We mix, we hybridize. In the U.S., certain cities had their own style, like Los Angeles, New York, Oakland, Chicago or Atlanta. Today, people have the choice to bring different styles into their dance. Even academic dances,” says the professional dancer and drummer, who started breakdancing around the age of 10, in Strasbourg, before training in contemporary dance.
These mixes don’t change the DNA of street dance: standing up for minorities who are discriminated against. A battle MC sometimes makes some political statements, talks about a dancer who didn’t obtain his visa to participate, or gives a platform to an organization advocating for a better treatment of migrants.
“Hip-hop culture was born from a social divide. Rather than using verbal or physical violence, those who are persecuted dance. The body has a language that speech can’t translate,” Joël says.
“You can’t do krumping if you don’t have something strong to express.”
During a face-to-face battle, some dancers like to provoke their opponent, by staring him down at close range, or by flying over him with an artistic kick if he is crouching. “Sometimes a dancer can be a bit aggressive if he has something to settle with the other person. But it’s rare,” says Guillaume Rues, a dancer who thinks that hip-hop, like rap, remains definitely politicized. “You can’t do krumping if you don’t have something strong to express. Same thing for waacking, which is part of the history of discrimination against the gay community.”
Krumping is this intimidating tribal dance that looks like grimacing boxing and that magnifies the violence of Los Angeles’ South Central, where it emerged at the beginning of the century. Waacking — undoubtedly the sexiest dance — was born in gay disco clubs of Los Angeles in the 1970s.
Across all these genres, the atmosphere is friendly. Everybody supports and applauds one another. Once the face-to-face battle is over, dancers hug each other.
“In the battles I take part in, whether in Nantes, Rennes, Lorient or Saint-Nazaire, there is a lot of emulation, sharing and mutual aid. We are welcoming to new dancers and we all end up knowing each other pretty well,” says Rues. The 30-year-old’s dancer friends make a running joke of introducing him at each battle with a new nickname: Stein, Stein Rodgers, Shwartch, Rodgers, Ohm or Atchohm.
Another symbol of this relaxed mindset is self-learning. As a teenager, Guillaume was inspired by Michael Jackson’s music videos. But if one thing is prohibited in breakdancing, its plagiarism. “We can take some inspiration, but not copy. If I invent something identifiable, then it will really be mine. Or, it has to be done in a filial relationship, from master to student,” says Rues.
French dancer P-Lock, a member of Crew Team Rocket easily recognizable by his beret, has trained numerous dancers and created French-style locking standards — characterized by his cool and floating style but marked by energy and high precision.
A real hip-hop community
Watching Vivek Kansara dance, with feline grace and waving arms, it’s easy to guess his Indian origins and influences. “I mix contemporary dance and hip-hop to create something new, my own style, which I call ‘Illusion’,” explains the 26-year-old man, who started dancing in 2012 with breaking and then house — with the help of Instagram, a few teachers and mostly his friends. They’re the ones who chose his stage name: VianFlow.
“I want to dance like water,” Kansara says in English from Nantes, where he decided to settle. “I came to France because there are good opportunities for dancers and a great hip-hop community. I want to represent my country here. And in Nantes, the people are very nice. The hip-hop community gives me support when I need it. We never feel alone.”
Why hip-hop? “Because there is so much freedom!” Except, some grumble, when the dance enters the realm of the Olympic Games.
The same people ranted about the sponsorship of a brand of energy drinks — somewhat not recommended for athletes — of the big world breakdancing event, the Red Bull BC One. But for Rues, turning hip-hop into a sport can have benefits: “It will bring visibility and inspire others to join.”
