Global Hip Hop Studies - Breaking and the Olympics, Jun 2023

As breaking moves to the Olympic stage, we anticipate that the dance will succumb to increased regulation, standardization and homogenization. The modifications that occur as dance migrates from a vernacular practice to a competition framework have been well identified in dance scholarship and are evident from existing international breaking contests that feature elite dancers who tactically train for these events. Undoubtedly, its presence in the Olympics will award breaking an unprecedented degree of international visibility, funding and sponsorship, and hyper-athleticism within this sporting domain. As breaking transforms into a global spectacle for a mass audience, many of whom will be unfamiliar with its history and culture, we look to Philadelphia as an exemplar of a collectively articulated and self-regulated breaking community to question what will be erased and no longer legible. We examine the diversity of participants, the myriad of styles and abilities, dancing in shitty spaces, the intimate presence of the crowd, and unregulated behaviours to consider what might be marginalized and why that matters.

In this article, we analyse the impact of breaking’s inclusion in the Olympics on the Australian breaking scene. We draw on our experiences as Australian breaking practitioners, as well as ethnographic field research conducted between 2018 and 2021, to show how Australian breakers have responded to, and made sense of, breaking becoming an Olympic sport. While some breakers see the Olympics as an opportunity and space for wider recognition, many have expressed concerns with the growing influence (and embrace) of transnational commercial organizations and institutional governing bodies in shaping and managing breaking’s future. Alongside concerns of an increasing sportification of breaking, this trajectory points towards an increasing loss of self-determination, agency and spontaneity for local Australian breakers and will have profound consequences for the way in which hip hop personhood is constantly ‘remade and renegotiated’ in Australia (Marie 2020: 4). Isolated from the major breaking hubs (North America/Asia/Europe), Australia’s breaking scene is marked by distinct, self-determined localized scenes separated from each other by the geographic expansiveness of this island-continent. Here, breaking is a space for those ‘othered’ by Australian institutions to express themselves and engage in new hierarchies of respect. We argue that breaking’s institutionalization via the Olympics will place breaking more firmly within this sporting nation’s hegemonic settler-colonial structures that rely upon racialized and gendered hierarchies. As such, in this article we discuss and examine how the Olympics impacts ongoing local, social and cultural productions and expressions of hip hop, and the distinct possibilities of breaking that enable its participants to ‘show and prove’ outside standardized, institutionalized rubrics.

For the title of an article to state that breaking is an 1980s pop cultural trend, this may have been forgivable in the 1990s, but it is not today. It is 2021 (at the time of writing this), and everyone has access to research via the internet. Breaking was not a trend that ended in the 1980s, and then ‘made the leap’ to the Olympics. It has succeeded in preserving and evolving the vocabulary that attracts the best dancers to it from around the world to this day. The dancers who upheld its history and solidified its place in the dance pantheon have created relationships with realms once thought of as intangible such as theatre and academia. Many hip hop dance movies have copied the format and theme of resilience found in the original cult classics such as Beat Street and Breaking. In this article, I explore the tensions emerging from lazy research practices sustained in the media surrounding the announcement that breaking would be included in the Olympic Games. I argue that mainstream media networks need to have a greater respect for the dance, its practitioners and its traditions to avoid this type of appropriation.

Before breaking’s official announcement into the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, other practitioners and members of pioneering crew the New York City Breakers had already dreamed about this future. This article presents an interview with breaking’s first impresario Michael Holman, who was the first individual to document this vision of breaking’s Olympic future in his book Breaking and the New York City Breakers (1984). Holman’s history in hip hop culture is both well documented and persists as one of the most important accounts of hip hop cultural intermediation and entrepreneurship. Notably, his early work in the New York scene was instrumental in developing hip hop and setting in motion the first wave of commercial viability for breaking. Holman’s discovery and management of breakers pushed boundaries in a time where few opportunities for professionalization existed – presenting breaking in new contexts for performance, showcase and expression, such as on television and in theatre. Our interview looks back to brushes with the Olympics in the past to think critically about what potential outcomes emerge from this pivotal moment in the dance’s global mainstream rediscovery. Holman’s reflections demonstrate how breaking in the Olympics has been articulated in the past while reminding us that breaking’s industrialization has already been underway for decades.