Many of us are watching our favorite athletes compete in Paris. And though it’s a spectacle we often think of as steeped in tradition, new sports are constantly being added to the games. Like surfing and skateboarding -at the 2020 Games in Tokyo.
This summer’s new event is "breaking," often known as “breakdancing,” though breakers themselves don’t use that term. It’s an addition that has its critics. There are purists who don’t think breaking is rigorous enough to be an Olympic sport, while others worry that “sportification” takes breaking too far from its roots.
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If you have any doubts that breaking is athletic enough to belong in the Olympics, I suggest taking a visit to the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts on a Wednesday night.
As you walk up to the third floor, the music is already spilling from the room at the top of the stairs — Studio B.
There are about 12 dancers spread out in a loose circle. They’re watching a guy dressed all in black in the middle. He kicks into a spinning headstand, his legs moving as if he’s dancing upside down, then he jumps back on his feet and joins the outer circle. Then the next breaker takes the floor.
There seems to be an unofficial uniform — sneakers, baggy pants, and a hoodie or a beanie that allows for literal head spinning. It’s hot up here, and most of the dancers are drenched in sweat.
This is the center’s weekly Break Dance Cypher Practice.
The cypher is like a place for everyone to kind of get down and exchange with each other. It's really supposed to be like the purest form of breaking.
That’s Rahul Doraiswami. He hosts these weekly sessions—he started them around 2017, when he realized that there wasn’t really a gathering place for breakers in the Mission anymore. CELLspace, a community arts space with deep community roots, had closed down during the tech boom in 2012.
Rahul had discovered breaking about five years earlier, when he was a student at UC Berkeley.
Rahul: Breakers from like all over the Bay Area would come to Berkeley to practice. It was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. Like the entire hallway was full of different cyphers, like different people. And it was people that when I had first started breaking were like heroes of the scene, like these world-famous b-boys from the Bay Area would come here, and I was so star struck.
There were breakers from well-known crews like Renegade Rockers from San Francisco, and members of Style Elements Crew from Stockton, Modesto, and San Jose. There’s also a rich history of breaking in places like, Oakland, Vallejo and Richmond.
Rahul: Really, there's scenes just like all over the Bay Area, and each one is very unique.
These Bay Area crews have thrived as a kind of underground scene for a long time, away from the mainstream. But breaking is about to appear on one of the biggest world stages there is: August 2024 marks its debut as an Olympic sport.
And of course, the breakers at the Wednesday night cypher have heard all about it — good and bad.
They just don't think that it should be considered an Olympic sport. Just like, Instagram comments, like I don’t even know who they are.
Jeremy Veray comes up to these weekly sessions from San Jose.
It’s just people saying like, “This is stupid. Why is this, why is this being an Olympic sport?” Blah, blah, blah, like, “Oh, should staring contest be next in the Olympics?”
He says, he wishes people would do some research to find out what’s involved in breaking, and understand its history.
I think there should be a little bit more appreciation towards what breakers do and where it came from—how African Americans and Latinos created this dance.
Breaking is a fundamental part of hip hop culture. As the story goes, it all started in August 1973. An 18-year-old known as DJ Kool Herc was deejaying at a street party in the Bronx. Rahul explains:
So, the origin of the term break dancing actually comes from this idea of a break in a record. And there would be a part of the record—I'm sure you've heard a lot of soul songs where like, there's kind of like a drum solo almost. So what they would do is, he would take that part of the record and he would just loop it over and over again. So you get this continuous like boom, boom cap, boom, boom cap, over and over again. And people at the party would start dancing to the break of the record, which is why it was called breaking.
But it’s not like breaking went directly from a 70s street party to the Olympic games. Breaking crews started staging competitions in clubs, and it got more and more popular. In 1983, breaking entered the pop culture mainstream by appearing in the movie Flashdance. This is around when outsiders started calling it “breakdancing,” a term that most breakers dislike.
The first international competition was held in 1990, and since then, breaking moves started becoming more standardized. Here’s Rahul again:
So you have like top rocks — you’re dancing up top, you're not necessarily touching the floor yet.
And then there are drops.
You know, your transition from the top to the bottom. There's footwork, there's power moves, which is a lot of the, like, windmills, flares, kind of the more like, dynamic kinds of movements.
When you want to hold any type of pose, that’s called a freeze.
A lot of times you'll have your elbow tucked into your side, or a handstand or something.
This weekend, there will be 32 breakers — 16 b-boys and 16 b-girls from all around the world — from Korea to Kazakhstan. (There will be one additional pre-qualifying round to give a 17th b-girl from Afghanistan a chance to compete as part of the Refugee Olympic Team.) They will compete against each other in battles. That’s a very different format from a cypher, where people are getting encouragement from the circle.
Rahul: In the earliest days, the reason battles happen is because a lot of times these different crews or these different people had real beef with each other. Like they had real history they wanted to settle. And breaking was like a way for them to do that without them having to like, you know, actually fight, because they were at a party.
In a battle, breakers need to be able to react to whatever their opponent does, so there’s no pre-set choreography to be judged against. They also don’t get to pick their music — the DJ decides what to play, and breakers need to choose their moves on the fly
At the Olympics, there will be nine judges. And they choose a winner based on five criteria: vocabulary, which is the variety of moves; originality; technique; execution; and musicality.
Rahul: Musicality — obviously, are you listening to the music? This whole dance has to be on beat.
So deciding winners and losers in breaking is maybe less straightforward than a lot of Olympic sports. And this makes sense, since breaking is, at its core, a dance. But this balance between creativity and athleticism can make things complicated.
There was an, an ongoing debate: Is it an art? Can it be a sport?
That’s Amy Shiah. At the Mission Cultural Center cypher, she’s been practicing headspins, her dark hair coming loose from its low ponytail.
And is it something that can even be judged in that way? Can you judge art in an athletic way?
Other breakers at the cypher had similarly mixed feelings. Here’s Jeremy again:
I do think that breaking being in the Olympics shouldn't take away from breaking being an art form because it stems from hip hop. Hip hop is, you know, it’s art, it’s culture. I think it would be a disservice to call breaking just a sport. Don’t forget where it came from. Don't forget that it's art.
And Jeremy says that when you’re watching, no matter what the judges say, look at what impression it leaves on YOU.
Look at how much fun people have when they dance. Look at how, how expressive they are. Just try to feel something when you watch it because that's what I feel — like a lot of people, when they dance, they want people to feel what they're feeling. They want people to connect with them and want people to connect to the music as those dancers are connecting to that music as well.
Rahul: And I would also say just, you know, like, don't stop there. Like, you'll see it in the Olympics, but come to events in your city.
Rahul says the best way to learn more about breaking is to see it in action — a cypher like this one, or a one-time jam.
Come to events if you're traveling somewhere. And just kind of keep an eye out for breakers and understand that there's like a rich cultural history behind this thing that's on the stage ,and it's not just a moment.
The summer of 2024 might be the first and last time that breaking will be an Olympic sport, since it won’t be included in the 2028 games in Los Angeles. But the vibrant breaking cultures in cities across the Bay Area aren’t going anywhere.
San Francisco breaking events:
Elephant Graveyard's ENTER THE GRAVEYARD Jam, September 14
AcroSports Open Sessions
Mission Cultural Center Cypher Practice
