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Global Breakdancing and the Intercultural Body

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2014

Halifu Osumare
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Extract

When I arrived at nine o'clock, the deejay was spinning “trip hop” style disks in the “chill room” upstairs until the formal dance show was supposed to start at ten o'clock downstairs. Critical mass is important: the event did not begin until midnight; size of crowd and group energy are the determining factors for starting time in hip hop culture. Eventually, the audience of about two hundred consisted of black, white, Asian, Hawaiian, military, and civilian patrons who were mostly in their late twenties. “What's up, y'all? Y'all ready for the show?” asked Jamal, Honolulu hip hop promoter and emcee, to open the event.

Jamal proceeded to read from a script about the beginnings of American society's acceptance of “African American culture in the 1920s Jazz Age,” putting what was about to happen in historical context and giving the event an informative purpose. This scripted narration of hip hop's historical context at a club event reflected an interest in specific African American origins of the pop culture form expressed by many global hip hop leaders. Thus began “Urban Movement,” a November 1998 b-boy (breakdance) event produced at the Wave Waikiki nightclub in Honolulu, on the island of Oahu. What followed was a demonstration of the current-day variations of hip hop dance that began in the 1970s with virtuosic athletic b-boying or b-girling and “popping,” the phenomenal muscular control of the rapid-fire rhythmic isolations. Urban Movement provided several hip hop enactments that illuminated what I investigate in this essay—the interdependence of performance and performativity as dual forces in global breakdancing.

Type
Articles
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , Winter 2002 , pp. 30 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 2002

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