Sacred, Perilous Movement: On Breaking
Track 1: Strasbourg, 1518
A woman named Frau Troffea begins dancing. In the streets of this Alsatian city plagued by famine, disease, and ominous portends, she twists and turns with abandon, her arms flailing, her feet stomping. Bewildered bystanders gather. Her feet swell, blister, then bleed. She dances on. At night, she collapses into a brief sleep. Upon waking, she continues where she left off, her movements growing more frenzied as exhaustion takes over. Over the next few weeks, this “dancing plague” would spread. The author John Waller imagines villagers afflicted by St. Vitus’ scourge performing the ring dances that were popular at the time, how the “the rapid circular motions may have deepened their states of delirium.” Round-and-round they went in an ouroboric trance, dancing the dance of death.
Track 2: The Bronx, 1973
A beat streams out from the rec room of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, where DJ Kool Herc fights the engineered urban entropy of Robert Moses and his ilk. He has set two turntables next to each other, each spinning its own record, letting the music come out in one uninterrupted flow. An astute diviner of energy, he had noticed a curious phenomenon at his parties: when the vocals would drop out of the song—reducing it to its most elemental form: the break—the dancers would enter into a kind of frenzy. That night, deciding to push this frenzy to its limits, he extends this tiny sliver of beat by cueing up the same track on each deck and looping the groove into itself, a technique he would later dub the “Merry-go-Round.” The break consumes the song. In this outstretched moment, dancers take to the floor, jumping, twisting, their movements becoming more extreme. Hip-hop and breaking are born. Only the sacred circle of the cipher can now contain the energy of those first break boys and break girls high on the beat.
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These two tracks play on the deck, separated by centuries, oceans, milieus unimaginable to one another. As the mixer cuts between them, the breaks start to blur. Two unintelligible rhythms briefly elide. Disaster and decay loop into euphoria and ecstasy, then back again. A charge builds from the movement between these poles—seeking points of release, vectors of motion, new mediums of articulation. Yet as with any latent energy, the question of who will get to direct this force remains. Rarely do we know where our dances will take us. For those revelers struck down by the dancing plague, it was death. But for the breaker descendents of Herc’s parties, this is still to be determined.
The notoriously corrupt IOC has finally recognized the electric power coursing through this dance—the same force that Herc sensed five decades ago—and is keen to siphon it off for attention and profit. The breaking—and note: it is always “breaking,” never “breakdancing”—community needn’t be reminded of the risks. Its commercialized kin, which sired countless whitewashed emcees, Bansky wannabe toys, and mediocre press-play DJs, offer grotesque premonitions of what might happen if contact with capital and exposure goes wrong. It certainly doesn’t help that the dance will be introduced to the Olympic games by the World DanceSport Federation, which has historically been more interested in ballroom than breaking.
Turning away from it all is a privilege few can afford. Faust was already a successful scholar when he made his bargain. But for the breakers that are trying to survive on their art today—or those who founded the dance and have been overlooked by history and capital—the story is different. Everlasting glory isn’t sought; it’s justice, dignity. The b-boys and b-girls standing at the precipice of appropriation carefully approach the tightrope leading to the other side. Livelihoods, histories, recognition, and culture are on the line. Like any mythic trial, success depends on our hero’s clarity of vision and surefooted sense of self, and at stake is nothing less than the soul.
We must go beyond the tired narratives of cultural exploitation or commercial gentrification that tend to dominate discourse. More often than not, these stories end up boiling down diverse artforms to some prelapsarian “authenticity” that erases rather than celebrates difference. To preserve what matters most, we must cultivate an appreciation of breaking on its own terms. Mine is just one small perspective of many; others are required. But after years giving myself to this dance, I hope to at least begin giving this misunderstood artform its proper due. The original dance of hip-hop is not what is conveniently sold as “hip-hop dance” in corny studios looking to spice up uninspired choreo, nor is it the worm or robot or whatever other caricature the media has proliferated. It is a philosophy etched in movement, one that confronts how one might find grace when its very possibility seems precluded.
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What are we to make of the fact that when confronted with the wretched, we dance? To have begun with the events of Strasbourg and the Bronx side-by-side is not to overlook the demands of historical specificity. There is no way of thinking about the dancing plague without recognizing a world where spirits and demons were as real as any creature of earth and sea—where, as Waller writes, humans sat between “cosmic conflicts between good and evil, God and the Devil.” Similarly, breaking is inextricably bound up with Black America’s reckoning with the ongoing catastrophic. Frederick Douglass’ reflection on the music he heard as an enslaved youth, particularly his observation on the role of the non-linguistic in working through inarticulable trauma, bears on us:
They would compose and sing as they went along, consulting neither time nor tune. The thought that came up, came out—if not in the word, in the sound… I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject.
Yet we also sense a deeper history here, one that lives within the archives of our flesh and bones. Flip the mixer back-and-forth at the right moments and a shared rhythm is felt. This subterranean heartbeat animates these rebellious movements, calls upon these disparate dancers across time to respond “if not in the word, in the sound”; if not in the sound, then in the movement.
Research indicates that our ability to speak and to dance are intertwined. One reason, perhaps, that animals like parrots and seals that can “produce complex vocalizations” are also “able to train themselves to synchronize their movements with rhythm,” as neuroscientist Constantina Theofanopoulou notes. The rhythmic meaning of the body is as primary as, if not prior to, our ideas of linguistically determined meaning. Humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor that, six million years ago, swayed to a beat. Doctors exploring movement therapies have long recognized the ocean of carnal meaning is far wider and deeper than the island of cognition that emerges from it. When the mind does not have the capacity to reckon with the world at hand (when speech, language, and thought itself fails) it is the body that articulates our poetics of resistance.
These dances do not all resist in the same way. The Alsatians fought subjection through a logic of negation. They sought disassociation, salvation through ego-death. It is this form of self-distancing that Mckenzie Wark similarly invokes in her reflections on raving. “This is the need: that for a few beats, or thousands, I’m not. Not here. Not anywhere.” For b-boys and b-girls however, it is immanence—not disconnected transcendence—that is doggedly pursued. They are unabashedly here, daring you not to look at their furious style. Left to rot at the end of history, they reject this marginal death and assert themselves with an arrogance redeemed by its improbability. The logics of violence introduced through socio-economic neglect and authoritarian policing, intended to decimate this place and these people, are reworked. Fights give way to battles, battles become dialogue, and from this dialogue emerges poetry.
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Formally, breaking is built off of five families of moves: toprock, go-downs, footwork, freezes, and powermoves. Toprock is everything that happens up-top while standing on two legs; go-downs transition dancers to the floor; footwork is what one might paradigmatically associate with breaking—steps and flows where the dancer is fully on the ground, supported by their arms; freezes are punctuations that “freeze” dancers in a moment, an impossible position extended in viscous time; powermoves are dynamic movements that use one’s momentum to spin and rotate in perpetual motion. In each set, dancers flow through these movesets, stringing together combinations that respond to the music and the others present in an ongoing dialogue of body and sound.
It’s a dance that negotiates a delicate balance between improvisation and structure—or more accurately, takes this binary and curls it back into itself. It is, on the one hand, chimeric, its technical arsenal continually expanding in rhizomatic fashion. Windmills, for example, were famously invented by Crazy Legs of Rock Steady Crew when he overshot a backspin into a chair freeze; rather than stopping, he swung back into a backspin, creating a motion that could be repeated continuously. On the other hand, it isn’t accurate to describe breaking as totally spontaneous—as if it were some “primitive” act that emerges ex nihilo. It is a praxis that demands practice. Years of drills and hard-earned headspin bald spots are the cost of fluency. Crazy Legs could have only invented the windmill by first knowing backspins and chair freezes, and then by refining his mistake into a technique. Few things require more discipline than improvisation.
Theorists are quick to warn us that the analytic breakdown of motion, particularly when combined with rigorous repetition, can create a “docile body” subject to structures of control via an internalization of disciplinary mechanisms. Dance is not immune to such corruption; it can easily become fascistic, as evidenced by the many abuses that have emerged from this world. Writing on ballet, Gloria Liu tells us how “physical techniques, rules, and habits are inscribed in the mind and soul of the dancer through constant surveillance, silence, and submission.” That is perhaps why Wark’s ravers find so much liberation in unstructured movement as they rock their way outside the discursive, ideological, social-historical regimes that create the conditions under which bodies are allowed to exist. To rave is to shed these controlling ideologies, or rather according to Wark, voluntarily give in to another one entirely: to submit to the machine, to meld with it and carve out an alternative space, a sideways time.
This desire to escape these bounded territories isn’t unfamiliar to the breaker either. However, they don’t achieve this by handing over the reins to another: whether it is the machine, a studio instructor, or even some platonic ideal of what a move “should” look like. Rather, they strive to fully submit to their own bodies, to seize the means of control for themselves—to be both creator and created, sculptor and clay. Years might be spent drilling a move, analyzing each micro-gesture, but it’s not truly in their repertoire until they can articulate it in their own terms—until they destroy what they have learned and replaced it with something that emerges from their unique way of moving throughout the world. Eric B. & Rakim talk of “a 4 letter word, when it's heard it control // Your body to dance: soul.” The kids who invented breaking may have been denied an interiority by the world around them, but when they moved, the soul seeped through—imbued the mute object with an undeniable presence that testified to them really being here, really existing right now. Importantly, this isn’t a soul that concerns itself with spectral hauntologies or handwavy ideas of “soulfulness,” but a political one that demands being in all its fullness. The b-boy stance is a call for recognition, a celebration of existence.
In A Little Devil in America, Hanif Abdurraqib discusses the distinction between the predominantly white dance marathons of the early twentieth century (which would often go on for days as participants attempted to break record after record in a “slow, plodding, death-defying”march) and the parallel world of Black dance:
The Black dancers who Lindy Hopped in segregated ballrooms or casinos were about celebrating their ability to move like no one else around them… After all, what is endurance to a people who have already endured?.... It did not come down to the limits of the body when pushed toward an impossible feat of linear time. No. It was about having a powerful enough relationship with freedom that you understand its limitations.
This spirit is carried on by the break, and is what—in its best moments—this dance can make you aware of: the hidden grammar of the body, the expressive shape of spirit. “One is not simply a body, but, in some very key sense, one does one's body and, indeed, one does one's body differently from one's contemporaries and from one's embodied predecessors and successors,” Judith Butler writes. There are few greater sins than biting, stealing someone else’s moves and pretending that your body is another’s. Practice a move enough, and you begin to feel something tugging at you—the excess that refuses to conform to the claustrophobic regimes that circumscribe us. You begin to flow in an unintended direction. Other dances might excise this as sloppiness. The breaker expands upon it, traces these lines of flight until it takes them someplace new. We call this style.
Watch someone truly great and it’s often not initially clear what they’ve even done. This isn’t because these dancers lack clarity or precision, but because their moves are formed around a language known only to them. AlienNess takes simple fundamentals and applies them in machine-gun rapidfire sets that fuse old school sensibilities with a cadence totally his own. Menno transforms into pure flow when he dances, eliding the boundaries between moves altogether. The breakers of ill-abilities—a super-group of differently-abled members including Lazy Legs, Samuka, Kujo, Checho, Redo, Krops, Perninha, and Junior—take our limited concept of a technique and explode it completely by using their bodies to express motion in a way that no other body could. To exist is to do it in style.
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The first real jam I went to took place at a repurposed church-turned-event-space in downtown Indianapolis. It was an ideal setting for us dispersed heartland congregants to come together—its wooden floors soft enough to try out the most punishing moves, slick enough to glide on, sticky enough to provide traction when needed. I went with some friends from high school. Up until then, we had only practiced in humid basements, the less trafficked corners of malls, and after school hallways, like cicadas shyly burrowed away. The sound of the music cascading from that building might as well have been the summer heat calling us forth, the revived house of worship the sun itself.
Funny enough, the images I recall over a decade later have little to do with my own performance. I don’t even remember if we made it out of the prelims (we probably didn’t). Instead, I see b-girl Peprika suspended in a backflip—everything slowed down in improbable time, waiting, waiting. Then, suddenly, accelerating as she sticks the landing and clinches the all-styles final. I catch visions of b-boy Amrit with barely a year of experience under his belt and no one to battle alongside, choosing to go up by himself in the group competition. Losing terribly in the most lionhearted way possible. I remember throwing down sets in the dance circles, laughing at the jokes made with a pun of a move, having conversation with footwork and toprock.
The scene was as diverse a space as you’re liable to get in Naptown. But we were all united by a common need. Indiana can be a lonely place. Things easily feel stretched out: the space between people, the minutes between the hours, the interminable roads heading up to endless sky. In the jam, however, spacetime curled into itself, inverted its function. Distance ceased to push things apart, uniting us for once and letting us find one another within its planar vastness; difference ceded its role as divider and became the starting point for connection. After all, one can only break when there is space in-between, when we pause to open up a circle into the zero point of indeterminate possibility. The anarchist Hakim Bey calls this a “temporary autonomous zone.” Breakers know it as the cipher.
The cipher—more than any officiated battle, performance, or Olympic games—is the true heart of breaking. In this circle, an entire world has the chance to be born anew. You go in turns to be baptized in its center, each gesture and movement becomes an unfurling that opens up to a wordless kind of mutual recognition, a link in an ongoing chain. It’s so central to breaking that there’s a meaningful distinction made between dancers who are good on stage or camera (with flashy moves that require a lot of space; codified routines easily seen at a distance) and those who live for the cipher: whose flows can adapt to circles of any size, who are willing to throw down set-after-set for as long as they have to, never saving anything for later because they know that this is where reputations are made. A breaker that ignores the cipher for the stage has already lost.
It’s a sacred space, what I imagine sites of confession or prayer might be for some. I’ve never been particularly good at telling a cohesive story about who I am and how I got here. Yet in the cipher, it’s as if the murky waters of my soul become transparent and cool. Though you might not always articulate yourself as well as you’d like, you can never lie when you break. Every move is present and honest, on full view. Being so exposed can be terrifying; but if you can push through, you stand to be seen, even known.
Critically, this sort of recognition doesn’t require us to adopt imperialist fantasies about some universal language or totalizing experience. Fred Moten reminds us how performances rooted in a Black tradition so often defy this Modernist project, grounding themselves instead in the particulars of its “material degradations.” These degradations encourage a “revaluation or reconstruction of value, one disruptive of the oppositions of speech and writing, and spirit and matter”; they dispel our tidy hermeneutic loops that seek to deconstruct wholes into parts, fit parts into wholes. Breaking teaches you that your body isn’t some deficient machine to be endlessly optimized. If you’re seen it isn’t because you’re slotted into a legible super-structure, but precisely because you can’t be. It’s your indefinable excess that calls upon the other to acknowledge you, that creates the conditions under which you might come into being.
In the cipher, I’ve often caught myself thinking: I have no clue what you just did, but whatever it was, it was incredible. You can’t help but feel like you know someone in those moments when they’re so utterly present, when your imagination couldn’t have even started to make up what you just witnessed. In the face of these unknown depths and unimagined potentials, one realizes just how boring solipsism is. I wonder if all that matters is to know that you really do exist, and that you exist alongside others. They hold space for you and your inspired sloppy excesses as you in turn will for them.
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Outro: Eden, 2024
To get to 1520 Sedgwick Ave these days, you have to get off at the appropriately named Mt. Eden stop. The walk from the train station is syncopated, arranged arrhythmically around highways and roads that run rudely through the borough. The building itself sits right off of Robert Moses’ infamous Cross Bronx Expressway—which halved the Bronx for the sake of white flight—blocking the most sensible path there and forcing you instead to cut into a small trail that runs through an overgrown lot. You arrive at Eden itself: an unassuming building mostly shadowed by scaffolding even on the brightest days.
On the day that I go, three white guys are hanging around outside. They ask me where I’m coming from, and when I answer Brooklyn, they seem unimpressed; they tell me that they’ve come from Germany to throw up some graffiti for the soon-to-be Temple of Hip-Hop museum on the ground floor. Meanwhile, the residents of the building are bringing in groceries. The absurdity isn’t lost on me. Three Germans and a Korean-American Midwesterner finding themselves in the Bronx sounds like the setup to a lame joke. The whole point of Eden is that it’s gone. So what are we doing here?
The Olympics are closing in. I have enough world-wariness to wonder if its inclusion in this politicking spectacle (not to mention my own involvement in breaking; the three Germans and me at Sedgwick; this very piece I’m now writing) is evidence that it has already lost whatever fangs it once had. Maybe I’ve been describing a ghost, a nostalgic imaginary that never was, or, worse, I'm contributing to its disappearance. It’s hard not to worry about what will happen to this dance’s expressive expansiveness when subject to the Olympian logic of sport. This positioning will inevitably introduce the inflexible notion of rules, objectivity, and technocratic “points” into an artform birthed from idiosyncratic interpretation. A realistic best-case scenario: the Olympics threaten the breadth of breaking’s style in favor of optimized formalization, the wrong people profit off of something that’s not theirs, and the culture is subject to the abstractions of advertisers looking to make a quick buck. Radical individuality is one of the most profitable products that can be sold, and pessimism is a soothing prophylactic to disappointment we’ve come to expect.
It’s no use expecting an easy answer to questions of how art might thrive in a world built around extractive exploitation. There are still moments in which such concerns become moot. When you hear the distant thump of a break and your heart starts to race with excitement; when you see an old friend at a jam and catch up in the cipher’s exchange of moves; when you witness all the hard work someone’s put into their craft come together in a moment of grace. Skepticism feels so besides the point in the presence of unbridled joy. Breaking demands hope. The party isn’t over. The music’s still flowing. What right do I have to call it quits? This is a dance born from daring to meet dark times with movement and song that affirm life. It’d be a betrayal of the highest order if we simply threw up our hands, cut the music, and stopped.