Break Dancing The Anti-Drug
More than just a dance, breaking evolves into a total lifestyle, and it’s one that steers dance crews away from drugs and gangs
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B-Boy Akuma demonstrates a freeze
Call it whatever you want - breakdancing, b-boying, b-girling, breaking - just don’t call it a sport, or even worse, a hobby.
Breakdancing is a lifestyle, an art. It is an expression of who you are.
“I love b-boying,” says 18-year-old B-Boy Dez, member of the Rock Steady Crew who has been breakdancing for 13 years. “I eat, live and breathe it.”
“We do it for love, we enjoy this dance,” says B-Boy Style Len, president of the Rock Steady Crew Hawaii Chapter. “We ain’t making money off of this. It’s what’s we believe. It’s in us.”
As one of the core elements of the hip-hop culture, break-dancing has deep roots, yet it continues to reinvent itself. It’s the constant reinventing of moves and dance styles that continues to keep it fresh and challenging. And with access to sites like YouTube and MySpace, these days it’s very easy to “bite” (copy) other people’s stuff.
But it’s not perfecting what’s been done that makes a great bboy, but instead making it your own.
“If you’re going to use something that someone already has done, you need to elevate that move so it’s a totally different move, because otherwise it’s biting,” says B-Boy Skill Roy, recent heavyweight battle champion and member of Rock Steady Crew. “You don’t want to bite someone else’s move.”
“And it’s all character,” adds B-Boy Style Len. “Sometimes you’re doing the same moves, but different people look totally different.”
“There’s always room to perfect your dancing because breaking it doesn’t stop,” adds B-Boy Akuma of the Waikiki B-Boys Crew. “It keeps you moving.”
B-Boy Skill Roy: ‘Biting’ is just wrong
To break it down, break-dancing is composed of toprock, footwork, freezes and power moves. Toprock is an upright dance that displays style. Footwork consists of footsteps done on the floor, usually with both hands and feet on the ground. Freezes, often used to end sets, involve holding the body in an awkward position. Power moves are mainly moves that require momentum to execute and are often physically demanding, such as backspins and headspins.
It’s important to perfect each of these elements. As B-Boy Style Len nicely puts it, “It all starts with a foundation. B-boying is like hula, you can’t just go out and move your hands and say I’m doing the hula. There’s history to it, and the same thing with b-boying. It’s more than just going out there and spinning on our heads. It’s rocking the beat and having your own character.”
Character is huge with b-boying and one of the hardest aspects of the dance. Character is what sets you apart and defines your style.
“Finding your character is the hardest thing to perfect. Because all the moves you can learn through practice, but to actually do it in your own style is something,” says B-Boy Skill Roy.
“For b-boys, they have a higher sense of creativity. It’s mostly creative and their own instead of copying,” adds B-Boy Flow, a sophomore at Damien High School and member of the Life Crew. “We look at stuff online, but we try to make everything our own.”
Ask any b-boy and he’ll tell you that individuality and self-expression are what define a great and respected breaker - the skills can be learned. What they’ll say doesn’t define them, however, is the whole gangster, thuggish image that many often associate with breakdancing.
“The biggest misconception is that we are gangsters - we definitely ain’t gangsters,” says B-Boy Style Len. “Everyone looks at this dance as a negative, but it’s a positive. Me, coming out of Kalihi where I live, I saw gangsters transform to b-boys and turn it around.”
It’s the negativity that’s often tagged to breakdancing and hip-hop that b-boy veterans BBoy Style Len and B-Boy Skill Roy hope to change. The two have been throwing it down since the early 1980s and are arguably the pioneers of Hawaii’s breakdancing scene.
Both born and raised in
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