BREAKDANCING: The Roots of The Street Dance

Breakdance (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Breakdancing is street dancing which began around 1969. Most people will agree that superstar James Brown began the whole thing with a dance called the "Good Foot". James Brown was a real innovator and his dancing was something to behold. He did things with his feet that would give most of us a couple of broken legs!

Simultaneously in the ghetto, what is known as the "dance battle" became very popular and in many cases replaced gangster warfare as a method to end disputes. Breakdancing lent itself very well to the dance battle and the Good Foot was a perfect base for breakdancing.

Street dancers adopted the Good Foot which, for a short period, became known as the B-Boy and then breakdancing. Back then the dance moves were a lot different from the kind of breaking we see today. There were no popular, documented moves such as the headspin or the windmill. The dancers simply used their feet and nothing else. Some would argue that this "old style breaking" is more complicated than the kind of dancing we see these days.

Some of the floor work improvised back then was fantastically complex. If you go to a modern breakdancing competition you won't see many of the old school moves but you will see a lot of gymnastics. Impressive though this is, there are those that think breakdancing has lost its roots a little. On the other side of the coin, you have people saying that it's just an evolution.

As a way to solve street battles and gang violence, it was inspired. You were finding that amazingly, the gangs were using breakdancing instead of fighting. The breakdancing "battle" took on a world of its own. Of course, there were still fights and inevitably sometimes a sore loser in a breaking battle would resort to violence.

Out of all this, breakdancing crews were formed. The members of a crew would practice and dance together. This is when the first very basic breakdancing choreography came about. One crew would invent a move that would inspire an opposing crew to go one better. For some of these guys breakdancing was literally the difference between life and death. They were very dedicated to what they were doing.

Just as all these new breakdancing crews were bursting onto the scene a guy called Afrika Bambaataa embraced the genre. Afrika Bambaataa is a legendary figure in the hip hop world. He was largely responsible for bringing breakdancing into the general public's consciousness. He got to know all the crews and encouraged them to develop what they were doing. Bambaataa's "Zulu Kings" breakdancing crew became a force to be reckoned with, winning many battles.

Since then breakdancing has continually progressed and more and more very talented dancers were bringing their skills into the arena. There were new moves being invented by the week and it wasn't long before we had headspins, windmills, backspin, and all the other high energy, acrobatic moves we see these days.

The "Rock Steady Crew" was one of the groups to pioneer this new school breaking. These guys along with Charles Ahearn who made the seminal hip hop movie "Wild Style" were to bring breakdancing fully up to date and the dancing phenomenon became much more popular. There was no stopping the onward march of the breakdance.

Nowadays breakdancing influences a lot of the choreographed dance routines which are an integral part of a modern pop record release. You have young kids coming up who are really into it and the genre is experiencing something of a renaissance. There's no doubt about it, breakdancing is here to stay and if you want more info a quick search on the Internet will turn up thousands of references to this modern art form.

Author: Fabio Marcell

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