This might be difficult to read but it was harder yet to write, as I have more uncertainty and more questions than I have answers.
By now, it is no secret that I am plateauing in dance. I have this vital need to see breakdancing through different lenses, because this is what I do. Beyond fun, beyond camaraderie, why would I chose acknowledge this cultural practice over others? I am voicing a dialectical reflection with myself, analyzing disparate perspectives that I am given without drawing straightaway conclusions. I have silenced my questions for too long for fear that I might insult my friends who have spent years perfecting their art; friends who highly motivated and conscientious, whom I look up to and call them my mentors. But I must question more fundamentally what my relationship to dance is. It is, after all, a revitalizing exercise to question the basis of one’s reality, if I could stretch this idea so far.
Proponents of the b-boy world promised this culture to be truly hybrid, identifiable and unalienating to youth, even breaking the boundaries of race and coming to its own in a “global village” sustained by expression. Being part of this world for nearly a year and being a spokesperson of its universalizing merits, I have uttered the very same assumptions. However, in this premature post, I will challenge that assertion and present breakdancing as something with limitations, even though it does offer reforms for the practice and visibility of dance.
Some definitions need to be clarified: I shall peruse the term ‘breakdancing’ over that of ‘bboying’ as more authentic for the phenomenon of what I am to analyze. The distinction is that breakdancing is a terminology coined by the media, often criticized for the inevitable appraisal of the dance’s potential profit-making capability. In contrast, b-boying is a name of respect amongst its ground-level practitioners. However, my contention is that the magnetism of popular media is ever more nuanced than bboys on the whole would identify it as. Indeed, I believe that breakdancing has failed to shake off the mold given to it by popular media. It is empirically observable that breakdancing is a dance style that persists as a profitable fascination in commercial arenas, something that is unprecedented amongst dance styles in scope except for “hip hop dance” that had been christened by music videos from its offset, and disco to a lesser degree if one wants a historical parallel. B-boys are all aware of its associations in trendy, modern music videos, but I hear no haranguing against its non-self-reflexive stuntsmanship. Rarely do I see us take a critical approach against working alongside the hegemonizing big brother media in its mode of address. We still demand the flashing lights, being the nightclub Epicurean, party-know-it-all, MTV-saturated attitude of b-boys lined up like military big guns as the crowning glory of our achievements. This isn’t what the basic language of a cypher circle is about, but it is what breakdancing has transformed itself to under the aegis of popular media, and what constitutes a great part of this generation’s imagination, dancers included.
Is breakdancing’s implicit growth sustained by popular media a necessary evil of its survival as basic techniques, or is its rhetoric merely reification (that is to say, the sociological definition: a hegemonic ideology naturalized by the common citizen which simultaneously supplaints their critical awareness for the power structures that disadvantages and alienates their true interests)? I would say that it is a bit of both: that breakdancing by its nature contains such energetic, blown-up moves that translates smashingly well under the big lights and the visceral Hollywood HD. However, this is not an inevitable, natural progression. Recall that bboying began from the streets as a form of the simultaneous, with its own rites of passage in technical ability that is preset on physical presentation rather than on a marketable culture (the packaged goods of certain shoes, certain brand labels making it big). The image of breakdancing that I see today are squandered in a moneyed exchange more than most styles of dance, especially when I see that it has become a global phenomenon as glorified in the documentary Planet B-Boy. It has become an exportable commodity to reach out to the nag value of the Westernized youth community, to enhance their sensibilities for a new cellphone, a gadget, sweets, Puma fall collection. contend that breakdancing has a crisis of identity even as it spreads globally. How many times have I seen in my mind’s eye the right way to execute a move as something that I’ve seen sponsored by Converse? How often do I hear that the only way to make a living as a breakdancer is to make yourself good enough that you represent the spirit of what you do in commercials? That’s the harsh light that I believe the younger generation of potential bboys absorbs with the blanket association of “breakdancing”.
Is there a difference between the sponsorship of the considered “high arts” – classical dances such as ballet-, and the sponsorship of street style dance? Once again, yes and no. HSBC sponsors Stars on Ice (freestyle figure skating), the Globe and Mail and CTV sponsors the National Ballet of Canada’s ’08-’09 season. Perhaps the less benign example is Stars on Ice, but even the sponsors for the National Ballet of Canada, although they are local media conglomerates, do not offer one distinct product-based business rhetoric that breakdancing thrives through. In other words, these dance styles’ sponsors do not permeate a sustained, militant, overt message of trendiness aimed at the youth to make them purchase particular and specific consumer items (Nikes, Samsungs, Toyotas). My reason for wearying this point is because I wholly believe that it makes a difference in what motivates the base of our creativity.
There’s recently been a recent influx of b-boy crews who reach out to the greater community with youth motivational programs, partly motivated by finding a younger and bright generation to pass on the technical and stylistic elements, partly to ride the wave of interest in alternate forms of more communitarian growth in a child’s athletic and artistic development. I quite support the perspective that a form of dance that emphasizes more groupwork and the pooling of teaching ability is a reform in the right direction from the chauvinized, singular development in some forms of competitive sports. Furthermore, it builds upon spontaneity of space, sound, and all its perceivers, and thus it has the potential to be performance art in the high art sense without being high art.
However, we preclude too much when we rule that breakdancing is inherently more democratic than any other forms of physical expression. Youth programs centered around breakdancing that I see nowadays are the step in the right direction. However, it does not step far enough if it merely gathers interest from pre-teens towards corporate aims. Pre-teens are particularly susceptible because of their expectation of the commercialized cool. Thus, any youth programs applying bboying as an art form should gather that interested energy and transform it into something more sustainable and creative, than being able to chose between one product and another. I’d go so far as to say that it can be this community effort that lends itself further to the survival of grassroots bboying, because the commercial alternative is that a trend is a trend and it will go out after a fashion. So the argument goes if one would see bboying as a subculture rather than just another mutation of hegemonic commercial culture, writ slightly unusual to give consumers a semblance of choice.
Commercialized culture must be readily made palatable to a large audience to be profitable, and has at its disposal an immense fund to play up ideas in order to make attractive a product, thus perpetuating its engine. This is of particular concern to the scholars of previously colonized countries as they are just coming out in their own with distinct political and civil identities, as well as social and cultural representation, and global cultural flows become ever more stringent. For example, sub-Saharan African filmmakers are particularly worried about the Ghettoization of their youth, or the glamorization of the ghetto as emulated from MTV hip hop. Breakdancing, when globalized for export, is therefore immaculately packaged with the raw attitude, the underdog with riches, the big-guns masculinity, and the energetic sexual fetishization. It must be pointed out that sub-Saharan Africans are aware that African Americans mean more Americans than Africans by virtue of their life opportunities and mediated identities. In the space of cultural Africa negotiating still against the subservience of colonialism and neocolonialism, breakdancing could never be seen as something hybrid and a “universally positive language” but a Western one. There’s a fragile line to preserve what’s theirs (“African-ness”) in the arts, when the language of the educated population has eroded to French, a cinematic technology informed by a French-German sponsorship and expertise, political arts seen as continentally bad-humoured, and economics in relative squalor to everyone else’s. The post-colonial generation had thusly sought to revolutionize not only the storytelling to have something relatible by the local masses, but also in the form that it presents its images as distinctly uninformed by Hollywood conventions. My friends, that is a more authentic hybridity than what breakdancing has currently achieved.
An eerie echo of this reification comes the construction of an attitude amongst South Korean bboy crews. History, that is, the telling of the past with the voice of the victorious, is placed into the mainstream in the Gamblers crew’s Battle Of The Year 2005 showcase (as seen on Planet B-Boy). In the performance, the crew is divided into two, one side wearing red and the other wearing blue, signifying the two parts of Korea. They spar with dizzifying array of flares and footwork, but at the end the two sides synchronize in mutual agreement that they share the same values: a reunification. Although clearly intended to be interpreted as a peaceful exchange of “culture” without fisticuffs, this could be seen as a disturbing Western cultural hegemony, precisely what the North Koreans abhor of their racial kin. It also distinctly begs the question of ‘where’s the East?’ in the phenomenon of globalizing street dance markets.
However, I remain optimistic that there can be new insights into a form of popular dance practice that is also not thoroughly informed by commercial rights. In talking about alternative energy, David Suzuki exclaims that “it’s an opportunity, not an impossibility”. He also finds that people tend to care after the environment as a side-benefit in a lifestyle that they conceive as good, rather than care for the environment as a prime motivation in and of itself. So too, I believe that the same can be applied to cultural energies, to see alternative mindsets as not only permissible, but necessary to a well-rounded cultural environment. The very existence of African Cinema as appealing and vibrant to Cannes and New York audiences gives me abundant hope.
Let us, at last, wrap up this chapter of discourse with the following anecdotes. In a number of my posts I have shared some thoughts where my opinion is one informed by film, or literature which relates to it. Suzuki’s declaration is stated in an episode of CBC’s Nature of Things, and my example of sub-Saharan Africa relate back to articles of John Akomfrah and Jude Akudinobi on the resilience of African Cinema. Any university-level film course endeavours to question how we relate to mediated ideology, and how the construction of any ideology can differ from the constructedness in the status quo. I find this to be important in questioning basic assumptions and values that spring from these sources, and what alternative sources can offer. I want to be able to say, you don’t need to buy into mainstream culture, whatever that mainstream culture consists of, and why. I want to believe that we the world’s people are not captive audiences to one cultural hegemon, and I want to be able to prove it.