Prophets in Pumas: when hip hop broke out

Dance Magazine, July, 2004 by Sally Sommer

In the late 1960s and '70s the four elements of hip hop--graffiti, rap, break dancing, and DJ-ing--blasted out from the Bronx in a complete cultural package. Pioneering black and Latino B-boys dancing to "Hip Hop, It Don't Stop!" foretold the future with each move, causing a seismic shift in dancing that set a revolution in motion. They were the original prophets wearing Pumas.

Break dancing ties the world's youth together through the universal language of the beat. This hip-hop world is positive, brilliant, and fresh. The other hip-hip world, the mainstream, is bigger, older, and richer. They are dedicated to big-time money, big-time stars selling sex, violence, materialism, and misogyny. ("Hey, we only reflect reality" they say.) But reality can be tough or tender. The youthful alternative is dedicated to re-establishing the realities of hip hop's positive power and values. This story is concerned with these dancing freedom-fighters.

Hip hop's elder founding fathers, DJ Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, and Afrika Bambaataa, molded a world view that encompassed a life-affirming philosophy, complex music, raw poetry, graffiti, and beautiful virtuosic dancing. Hip Hop ripped though urban areas and grabbed hold by 1980. And today battles of innovative wild-styles and rap and breaking flare around the globe. Versed in the world beat and ciphers, breakers in Paris, Tokyo, or Sri Lanka are more like, than different from, their American counterparts. Hip hop creates new identities by transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. Graffiti writers twisted ordinary alphabet letters into a new colorful street-art. Break-dancers broke movement apart and pushed it to the extremes, twisting a turn until they were spinning on shoulders and butts, doing one-hand spins, or knocking off forty-seven consecutive no-hands headspins. B-boys like pioneer Crazy Legs twisted and spiraled torso and legs into wildstyle calligraphy that left a marker in space. DJs scratched and spun records on the tables (in today's competitions, DJs even stand on top of turntables!), creating fresh sounds and beats. Rappers twisted words and ideas into improbable rhymes, creating new meanings.

Before hip hop were mainstream (in 1985 the Grammys created the hip hop category), the early pioneers lived intensely. Most were convinced they would die young, so they moved fast, plastering the streets with dance, sound, and art, leaving pieces of themselves throughout the city. Today, in the same spirit, South Los Angeles dance-warriors defy death and negativity through krumpin' faster and harder than ever (see p. 32), declaring a passion for life in the same way that extreme skate--or snow-boarders flip and twirl down stairs or mountain slopes.

From 1986 on, the music industry mined gold front the urban rubble, and rappers reigned supreme. Break-dancers got pushed underground, and the rappers mutated into hard-core gangstas, then "Players," then big Mac Daddies, who pushed women clown to 'ho's as their personal booty, or, booty dancers.

Disgusted with the mainstream's promotion of violence, misogyny, materialism (mo' is bettah), restless youth retaliated by returning to the original values of hip bop. They concentrated on the battles of improvisation where weapons are bodies and minds. Battles test intelligence and style rather than brute strength and speed. Thinking on your feet, under pressure, is the top of the game in breaking, locking, popping, uprock, krumpin', fast-footwork, rap, and scratchin'. This competitive spirit ignites the best parts of the film, 8 Mile, and the new documentary Krumped; even the over-produced, hyped, Star-Search style of dancing in the movie You Got Served (2004) catches its raw joy. Slamming down a move or outwitting a challenger with rhymes and moves--on the beat--demands the highest mental and physical imagination. Everything is focused, pushed fast-forward on adrenaline, which causes the poetic and dance styles to morph so quickly that you can't keep up.

Sampling and remixing from the world's music and dance styles, hip hop has become multicultural, multinational, and multivocal. Since the early 1980s it has fed concert dancing, from postmodern to tap and even ballet. One of the earliest choreographers who fused breaking and popping with modern dance was Doug Elkins. Offstage, Elkins could spontaneously bust out with The Browns, a fantastical combination of dancing from postmodernist Trisha Brown and James Brown, "The GodFather of Soul," filtered through the hip-hop soul. For several years Elkins offered workshops in Europe, where hip-hop groups like France's Compagnie Kafig and Sweden's Moves Per Minute have thrived.

David Neumann danced with Elkins for years before going independent. Now a choreographer/actor, Neumaun is a master-melder of hip hop and modern dance. In Pearl River (2000), he showed the connections between Kung fu, hip hop, and modern dance. In his solos to Tom Waits songs, Neumann breaks down to the floor, then spins up to his feet, popping and locking in the silky phrases that are part of a new breed of jazz dance.