Chapter 42

“Breakdancing had its peak as an artform a while ago”

That was what a lot of us thought in the UWB (University of Waterloo Breakers). This thought stemmed from the fact that during the golden era, as fun as it was, our members for breakdancing were usually the same people after my year. Without a healthy younger generation, it is almost impossible to sustain our club. Looking beyond just breakdancing, it wasn’t hard to see where we were headed also. A dreaded foreshadowing in the form of UW Poppers. 

UWB was the last of the old style hip hop dancers. By this I mean we used to have another club of the University of Waterloo Poppers but due to low membership numbers, they were unable to establish a proper club around 2014 and dwindled out. Timeline-wise, this was when the golden era of UWB slowed down too. It was kind of sad to see. UW Poppers silently went off into the night. Before we knew it, they were no longer registered with Waterloo and thus lost privileges such as booking specific spaces for dancing or organizing official Waterloo club events. 

While that is kind of sad in its own way, it wasn’t like the poppers were completely gone. They occasionally simply danced with the breakers whenever we got the space. We didn’t mind sharing and we had plenty of dance spaces due to lack of new members. It was a decent co-existence we worked out although kind of ominous in its own way. 

While UW Poppers and UWB were seen as oldies and on their last legs, it didn’t mean the people at the University of Waterloo weren’t dancing. In fact, in a general sense, Waterloo students were dancing hip hop more than ever. So much so that UW Hip Hop, a club considered to be among the new generations of hip hop, was at some point, considered the biggest club on campus. A pretty outstanding title in a school of thousands. 

So what can we infer from this? Well. Breakdancing and Popper were now “old”. We weren’t really “hip” enough for hip hop anymore. As UW Hip Hop grew more and more, UWB and UW Poppers seemed only to diminish in numbers throughout the years. I think the main issue was that breaking in itself wasn’t really mainstream anymore. Hip Hop was much more well known and seemed like the thing to do if you only got to choose one and remember, in university, time management is a big deal. So in some sense, it seemed like Hip Hop ended up stealing most of the would-be breakers. 

We didn’t blame them. Sometimes people just wanted to do Hip Hop and a difference of preference is not something you can really fault people for. The breakers actually had pretty good relations with UW Hip Hop in actuality. We were always out of each other’s way. But the thing is, we didn’t really truly see eye to eye. The reason? There is a fundamental difference between Hop Hop in the new generation and breakdancing as I know it. This reason would also be one of the critical factors for why breakdancing had a chance at the Olympics eventually. 

So why was breakdancing a thing of the past and why didn’t we get along fully with Hip Hop despite being good friends with them? The theory for this was that there was a methodology difference between the two. I have nothing against hip hop but it wasn’t my cup of tea. That isn’t to say that I didn’t like the people in Hip Hop. We were good friends with them. We just didn’t dance with them. This is because I learned breakdancing, like many others, in a Bottom to Top way.

When the breakdancers talk about Bottom Top learning, it’s in reference to how you grow as a dancer in this genre. By this I mean that you would only learn the basics and then are left to make your own moves. Your vocabulary of moves comes from all the media you consume, all the sessions you have with others and those who are in your practice groups. It defines you because you build it from the bottom from scratch. 

If you ever take a breakdance lesson, you’ll quickly see this too. We don’t really teach you what to do beyond the basics. They essentially teach you common trends that people tend to do in breakdance that are so ubiquitous that they are deemed “fundamentals” like “six step” or “Indian step”. But after that? You’re on your own. You can’t grow at all by being taught much more. You have to make your own unique style. There is even a barrier preventing you from copying others. If you try to copy someone else to just get better, you’ll be called out for “biting”. A taboo thing in breakdancing that was instigated specifically because we value extreme levels of unique individuality. You can learn the fundamentals, but after that, to be truly accepted into the scene, you must develop your own dance vocabulary and go on your own journey. 

This led to a natural style of dancing that was unique to each individual. You would never really do the same moves again as someone else because that was just how the dance evolved. Sure, there were specific combos and common themes seen by those in the scene but rarely do you have completely congruent full sets. Breakers liked uniqueness. In fact, outside of you dancing like nobody else, breakers also didn’t even like to dance like our past selves. Save for a small set of “signatures” that we all pulled from time to time, we liked to dance according to the situations we were in. This meant that the dancer you were opposite of and the crowd also played a role in the way we danced. With each setting, even with the same dancer, you will always get a different experience. Like I said, extreme priority towards uniqueness. 

The entire dance was meant to stand out. Stand out from others and even yourself. We wanted a full expression of yourself in a way that was different every time. This also made it quite intimidating. Why? Imagine this, you are new to a hobby and after being taught the bare basics, you are now thrust onto the same floor as everyone else. Oftentimes, if you’re insecure about yourself dancing, you would struggle with this anxiety and honestly, who can blame you? It personally took me over a decade to get over this anxiety. 

Other times, people aren’t really keen on expressing themselves in a large group of basically strangers. It’s much easier to start off dancing as a group where you do all the same thing. It’s just easier to communicate to a group or audience when you have more numbers on your side. Unsurprisingly, this was one of the reasons why Hip Hop was recruiting so much better than the Breakers. They did this group learning strategy that can also be seen as Top to Bottom Learning.

Top Bottom learning is exactly how it sounds. Instead of being given just some fundamentals and being pushed into the spotlight to grow yourself, you start off by learning to imitate someone with more knowledge than you. Their choreography acted as a recipe and all you have to do is mix it all together. You learned from those at the top and developed fundamentals as you understood it more and more. With time, you learned how to manipulate the fine movements on the bottom. 

When I first learned about UW Hip Hop, I was reminded that it was just like classical music. Someone did a choreographed dance and then gave you instructions to execute it that way. The moves were there and all you had to do was reenact it. Sure there wasn’t a lot of room for individuality and self expression but as a starter, this was just so much more welcoming than anything breaking could have offered. I saw this as an equivalent to learning a piece of classical music. You first tried your best to follow how the original composer did it or how a world class virtuoso did it and then learned about the fundamentals as you kept imitating the greats. Someone was very creative and made something. You now copy it and repeat doing it until you also learn how to do it. It seemed to parallel very well in this sense. Now, if Hip Hop was to Classical music, what was breakdance akin to? 

Simple. It’s Jazz. 

Now, before I go into that parallel, let’s just clear up something. There is some level of personality in Hip Hop. It’s kind of subtle. But it is definitely there. I feel that whenever I talk about this I need to remind the reader about it because to the untrained eye, classical music and hip hop seems kind of robotic. You just follow a simple guide and while doing the actions told is difficult, it is just that. Following instructions. Except it’s not. If you’ll recall, I said classical music with the utilization of sheet music was like a cooking recipe. If you add in these intonations and these rhythms you will make a well played piece just like if you add in onions and garlic you’ll make a good dish. However, the cooking process, even with the same ingredients, will still feel different just from being cooked by different people and from being cooked at different settings. 

The dynamics, rubato and the small personalized articulations in classical music makes it so that, though subtle, it is still very different from one musician to another. Of course, this is not even talking about the pure anti-thesis of following instructions in the form of Cadenzas. Tempo is often fluid and so is its fluidity. Slow down at this part but by how much? And how quickly? There are certain things in sheet music that are left to the interpretations of the artist that is playing it. Some may say this is an oversight on the composer but most musicians these days would argue that it was intentionally left in for some form of subtle expression given by the composer. This is even more true about hip hop.

Hip hop, being a dance, has an extra layer of differences in the form of moving with the body. You may have the same recipe for a dish but you possess different cooking gear in the form of different bodies. You can do the same choreography and the same moves, but your body being uniquely yours means there will always be a difference in being unique when you do it. 

Okay, tangent over. There are differences in cooking even with the same recipe but it’s just subtle sometimes. So what about it? The point is this. People are much more comfortable with getting all the recipes then cooking than just cooking by finding out for yourself what works and what doesn’t. That was the problem. People have to create everything they know from the ground up from the media they consume or their locally sourced materials, which were usually the dancers they hung out with.

As I alluded to earlier, this makes breakdancing similar to jazz. You learn some vocabulary and the general gist of the scene then off you go to explore your own artistic whims. Actually, in truth, breakdancing and jazz have even more things in common. One more thing that makes the two similar? They’re both more towards the realm of “in the moment” styles of art. That is to say, they’re more impromptu and situational. Jazz and breakdancing usually move from moment to moment and heavily depend on who you’re dancing with, and who you are dancing for. Adapting was the key here. 

If you’ll recall, I said this previously that breakdancing has such a strong weight on uniqueness that we don’t even want any semblance to ourselves. The only way to achieve that every time? To take in from the immediate surrounding area. To achieve this, there would have to be some form of interaction between you and the audience or the dancers around you. By this I mean to say that both Jazz and breakdancing are dependent on the people you are with. For both styles of art, it was often expected that you would converse and be with the group you were dancing with or playing music with. Sometimes the audience too. This meant that there was a passively interactive side towards others that will never be eliminated and this also meant that to truly be excellent at breakdancing, you can’t simply exclusively drill your moves by yourself.

So now, we have two things in common between breakdancing and Jazz. The lack of a preplanned recipe and passive (or sometimes active) interactions with those around you. But wait! There’s more similarities! Though we are approaching the speculation territory now. Also to note, this passage’s first draft was written before the announcement of the Olympics and breaking so it may be a bit dated. But regardless, later in the next chapters you’ll find that I would take a course in Jazz history. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to learn from that class but it did lead to me exploring Jazz and its fall out. There, I would find an interesting story on how it passed on. 

The gist of it is this. When first Jazz came along, it got popular very quickly and garnered quite a lot of attention. I suppose this was a trend for anything “new” and “popular”. After the mainstream appeal slowly died off, it was then slowly succeeded by the next thing. There’s a lot of debate on what that was but in class we broadly said it was Rock and Roll. When Rock and Roll came, people thought, “well, that’s it for Jazz then, soon it will be lost to obscurity”. In truth, that was only somewhat true. 

When an artform first presents. It gets famous and popular. Then, as time progresses, people get tired of it. Given more time, the world learns to forget about it. But the thing is, just because the world forgets about it doesn’t mean the thing is forgotten. With Jazz and a lot of art genres that have passed their time, they don’t tend to dwindle completely but rather, evolve into very niche collectives. More interestingly, that is when the artform truly grows.

Going again back to the Jazz example. There is still Jazz today, albeit not as large as a scene when it was most popular, but it still persists. Moreso, Jazz has changed and become more evolved today. The Jazz we play now is very different from what we used to do and what we started with. It has become refined. That took form in the survival camps of Jazz after it fell out of the spotlight. It got niche and it kept going. I think of it as the art form going through a transformation of debloating. When Jazz stops being popular, only the artists who truly love Jazz will continue on with it. When you force those artists who truly love and understand Jazz into smaller groups because the scene dwindles, it’s bound to cause advancements. 

I think, and I hope, breakdancing will go the same way. We had our popularity hit a pretty high peak back in the mid-1990s. Since then, it seems every year we only get more and more hip hop, k pop and other genres arising and less and less breakdancing. However, despite the fact that there is less breakdancing altogether, if you focus on the breakdancing that has survived its loss in popularity, you can see the beginnings of breakdancing becoming more and more refined. It is quite exciting to observe this in real time. Or Reel time.  

With the advent of social media and the gradual conversion to more complexity, it’s easy to claim that break dancers today are doing things we couldn’t have possibly imagined just a decade ago. What happens as it keeps on evolving? We may hit boundaries we never would have expected! 

I don’t think Breakdancing is going away anytime soon. I’m secretly hoping the Olympics may increase our numbers a bit but only time will tell. But regardless, I can tell you from the perspective as someone who oversaw numerous generations of the UWB that local breakdancing circles have definitely suffered in numbers in the last decade. And with the same faces still on the scene and a limited number of new generation breakers, it is hard to see how a resurgence would even be possible. But hey, if we have to go niche to survive, it’s not such a bad thing. I think it’s just a process of a longstanding genre of art. Hopefully, just like Jazz, we’ll persist into the future and continue to explore the genre for generations to come. 

I hope I conveyed to you that I put some effort into thinking about Breakdancing. It has become more than just a means to run away from my parental pressures and also more than a means to simply do exercise. In university, Breakdancing easily superseded a lot of other hobbies I had and in first year university, I would say it even overtook classical music. I thought it was worth it. I was also glad I was able to come to some of these conclusions as I stuck with the hobby and kept going with it. 

The passage of time had not been too kind to UWB though. You’ll see later on that I would stay at the University of Waterloo for a total of 8 years and I’d be around to witness the rise and fall of the University of Waterloo Breaker’s legacy. 

More on that later though. 

***Editor’s note/aside***

I often get a question about breakdancing and why people keep on trying to bring up its old roots and old histories. The question is this:

“If breakdancing is so spontaneous and in the moment, why do we have such a strong emphasis on our roots?”

To put it more precisely, if breakdancing is an ever changing art form that is supposed to change even from day to day, why are the old generations angry that we are now in the Olympics? It’s different, sure, but isn’t being different what we’re all about? The answer is? 

“Good question!”

On some level, the older generation and the newer generation are arguing on what counts as expression. Should you have no filters? Or should you have some filters so we can get sponsors and funding and get to participate in the Olympics? What comes after this is the ongoing and probably endless debate of old school breakdancing and new age breakdancing. Olympic breakdancing versus the breaking I know. This is an endless loop. Check the last chapter if you want my take on it.