I was having a walk in the quarter the other\u00a0day and, I run into some people who were dancing in the street. It had been a long time since I had a walk and I\u00a0was amazed to see that still, the youth in the streets are dancing. People embraced\u00a0me and we\u00a0had a small singing stance with the boom boxes looping some tunes of\u00a0mine for an hour or some. I really had a great time!<\/p>\n
Many elements of breakdancing can be seen in other antecedent cultures prior to the 1970s. B-boy pioneers Richard “Crazy Legs” Colon and Kenneth “Ken Swift” Gabbert, both of Rock Steady Crew, cite\u00a0James Brown\u00a0and\u00a0Kung Fu films\u00a0as influences. Many of the acrobatic moves, such as the\u00a0flare, show clear connections to gymnastics. In the 1877 book ‘Rob Roy on the Baltic’ John MacGregor describes seeing near\u00a0Norrk\u00f6ping\u00a0a ‘…young man quite alone, who was practicing over and over the most inexplicable leap in the air…he swung himself up, and then round on his hand for a point, when his upper leg described a great circle…’. The engraving shows a young man apparently breakdancing. The dance was called the Giesse Harad Polska or ‘salmon district dance’. A young street dancer performing acrobatic headspins was recorded by Thomas Edison in 1898.\u00a0 However, it was not until the 1970s that b-boying developed as a defined dance style in the United States. There is also evidence of this style of dancing in Kaduna, Nigeria in 1959.<\/p>\n
Beginning with\u00a0DJ Kool Herc, Bronx-based DJs would take the rhythmic breakdown sections (also known as the “breaks”) of dance records and prolong them by looping them successively. The breakbeat provided a rhythmic base that allowed dancers to display their improvisational skills during the duration of the break. This led to the first\u00a0battles\u2014turn-based dance competitions between two individuals or dance crews judged with respect to creativity, skill, and musicality. These battles occurred in\u00a0cyphers\u2014circles of people gathered around the breakers. Though at its inception the earliest b-boys were “close to 90 percent African-American”, dance crews such as “SalSoul” and “Rockwell Association” were populated almost entirely by Puerto Rican-Americans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was having a walk in the quarter the other\u00a0day and, I run into some people who were dancing in the street. It had been a long time since I had a walk and I\u00a0was amazed to see that still, the youth in the streets are dancing. People embraced\u00a0me and we\u00a0had a small singing stance with the boom boxes looping some tunes of\u00a0mine for an hour or some. I really had a great time!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":990,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n