The truce between New York gangs that gave rise to an Olympic sport – 02/04/2023 – Sports

Breaking, or break dancing, was included as a competition modality at the Paris Olympics in 2024.

Many people may have been surprised by the decision. But for writer, producer, artist, entrepreneur and self-described hip hop pioneer Michael Holman, it was the realization of a vision he had 40 years ago.

The Olympic Games website describes breaking as a hip hop dance style characterized by “acrobatic movements and stylized steps”.

But it’s a very different format than ice skating and gymnastics. Athletes don’t wait their turn to perform individually and impress the judges.

Breaking dancers will hit the Parisian dancefloors in pairs, shoulder-to-shoulder and besting each other’s moves to take home a medal.

In the early 1980s, Michael Holman promoted a weekly hip hop revue in a New York club combining rap and graffiti with the new form of street dancing.

In the beginning, the goal was to introduce yourself. The performers danced, the audience applauded, the night went on and on came the next act.

But Holman insisted on adding one more element to his successful night.

“New York is competition, it’s trying to be the best,” he says. “And I wanted to bring another group into the fray. I wanted the audience to see combat, not just dance moves.”

It was what Holman had witnessed months earlier on the New York streets of the Bronx. There, breaking emerged as a form of dance competition, as an outlet for the gang tensions that plagued 1970s New York.

“There were the [grupos] Ghetto Brothers, Black Spades, Savage Nomads and Savage Skulls,” Holman recalls. “And they were slaughtering each other for years, killing each other.”

“Until, in 1971, Yellow Benji — the leader of the Ghetto Brothers — forced a truce that allowed the boys and girls of rival gangs to come together and party.”

It was at these parties that dance replaced violence as an outlet for neighborhood feuds.

“Dancers would watch other dancers say, ‘Wow, that’s fantastic,'” Holman continues. “‘The way you’re bringing the kung fu steps of the Chinese community… I’m going to incorporate your kung fu and include my African dance, or incorporate it into the Puerto Rican gymnastics aesthetic.'”

“All of that, dancing to old James Brown records mixed on the Jamaican-style sound systems. It’s hip hop dance culture,” he says.

human gyros

The first group of permanent breaking dancers on Holman nights was informally managed by him and was called the Rock Steady Crew.

Initially, they were hesitant to share the stage with a rival group, but eventually gave in to Holman’s requests.

“I brought in a group called the Floor Masters, which exploded, it was a historic moment,” says Holman.

“The Floor Masters were much more athletic, faster and more powerful. When I saw their match, I dumped the Rock Steady Crew like a hot potato.”

Holman helped form and manage a new breaking group focused solely on the “power” steps he observed in the Floor Masters.

They called the best dancers from the best groups in the five districts of the city. The new group was named the New York City Breakers and included some of the exponents of the new art form: Noel “Kid Nice” Manguel, Matthew “Glide Master” Caban and Tony “Powerful Pexster” Lopez.

Together they took breaking to a new level of technique.

“I got rid of the weak dancers and investigated three or four different groups around town. I created a powerful supergroup,” says Holman.

“You [New York City] Breakers were like gyroscopes,” he says. “They would start taking steps, drop to the ground, and use some kind of internal propulsion, mixed with ground friction, to simultaneously propel themselves or spread out in a certain way. They created an internal energy.”

“They could spin and show off. They created a new form of movement, it was pure poetry.”

‘Look at me, see what I can do’

Holman arrived in New York from San Francisco for the first time in 1978. He worked at a bank on Wall Street, but “wore the shirt of [banda] Brookes Brothers Every Day” and quickly fell in love with the dark culture of the city he called home.

“I lived in an apartment between [as ruas] Hudson and Chambers,” he says.

“I would get off the elevator in the morning and find Joey Ramone [vocalista dos Ramones] coming out of an all-night party with a girl on each arm. It was crazy.”

Holman soon became part of that scene, befriending pioneering graffiti artist the Fab Five Freddy and frequenting nightclubs like Max’s Kansas City, Mudd Club, and CBGBs—venues that allowed him to mingle with up-and-coming musicians, poets, and other artists.

“I was devouring New York like ice cream,” says Holman wistfully.

He remembers returning alone from a late-night party when he saw the first signs of a new street culture emerging around him.

“I was waiting for the subway, almost asleep,” he recalls. “That’s when the train arrived at the station, covered from top to bottom with graffiti marks and burners. [desenhos grandes e detalhados, feitos com tinta spray] through all the windows.”

“I had never seen anything like it before, it was a crazed message from the streets. It was vandalism, but it was beautiful at the same time.”

“It was young people saying, ‘Look at me. See what I can do. I’m not a nobody. OK, this city is home to the United Nations, it’s the capital of the press and finance, but I’m a boy from the Bronx and I’m also good at something!'”

For Holman, that ethos it was also behind the rise of hip hop and the compulsion of breaking dancers to express themselves through dance.

“The question is, ‘look at me, I’m somebody,'” he explains. “I can pick up a microphone and write my own poetry, I can cut and scratch a record player, I can rock the dance floor, I can spin your head like you never imagined.'”

“The boys were creating their own universe, with just two turntables, a microphone and linoleum,” he says.

world phenomenon

As Holman made music, filmed and soaked up the energy of New York, he wondered if the city’s small breaking and hip hop scene would become an emerging trend, like the punk that had flourished in London and New York in the previous decade.

“A friend of mine had studied with Malcolm McLaren [o empresário da banda Sex Pistols] in the 1960s,” says Holman.

“When McLaren visited New York, I invited him to a party in the Bronx with [os DJs] Afrika Bambaataa and Jazzy Jay. I took him to a crowded park where the DJs had their sound systems and the boys and girls danced.”

“Malcolm was surprised and asked me to do an analysis. Well, I did,” according to Holman.

McLaren had a good instinct for revolutionary cultural movements. British band the Sex Pistols had become a punk icon after the release of the anti-monarchist single God Save the Queen, which coincided with Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee in 1977.

He put Holman in touch with an English prosecutor who lived in town named Ruza “Kool Lady” Blue. She hosted a regular night at the Jamaican-owned NeGril nightclub.

In November 1981, the club was a hit with Holman’s DJ friends and the breakdancing dancers of The Rock Steady Crew.

When word got out about hip hop nights, with the newly formed supergroup and their fantastic breaking performances at Holman’s nights at NeGril, the New York press also began to take notice.

“Well, what we were doing became the news of the month in the international press,” he says. “We’ve hosted documentary production teams from all over the world in New York: the BBC, Canal Plus [França]NHK [Japão]Rai TV [Itália] and the ZDF [Alemanha].”

“They would come in and shoot the Breakers, edit it and send it back to their home countries. And it was on the news that night,” he says. “So you had the boys in London, Tokyo and Paris getting hip hop culture before the boys in Pittsburgh [nos Estados Unidos].”

Holman then decided to produce his own content. He created and hosted the TV music show Graffiti Rock in 1984, dedicated to hip hop, following the lead of the hit show Soul Train and featuring the bands Run-DMC, Kool Moe Dee and Special K, as well as the New York City Breakers.

“It was the world’s first hip hop TV show,” says Holman.

The New York City Breakers also invaded the mainstream press in the central United States. They appeared on the Merv Griffin Show (a popular US talk show), CBS Evening News, Good Morning America, and on Soul Train itself.

The group also appeared in a music video with their breaking moves, while soul legend Gladys Knight sang “Save the Overtime (For Me)”.

The last major event hosted by Holman for the New York City Breakers took place at the London School of Contemporary Dance in 1987.

“At that time, the shows were winding down,” he says. “[O breaking] it was seen as a passing fad. The press had turned away and the Breakers were starting to go their own ways.”

But elsewhere, the party continued.

“Like many cultural movements that started in the US, like jazz, rock and blues, they die here to find new life and identity abroad,” explains Holman. “The same thing happened with breaking.”

In the late 1990s, Holman received invitations to hip hop conventions around the world. There was interest in Australia, Asia, Europe and South America.

He organized panels and lectures about the movement, watched films about breaking and participated in dance workshops, with original dancers invited to attend.

A young Polish dance group went so far as to show him that they had learned a choreography from Graffiti Rock, step by step. But not all dancers were so likable.

“I used to get a lot of weird looks from some of the dancers when I showed up,” says Holman. “They’d say, ‘Oh, you’re the one who tried to turn this into a sport, tried to kill the art form.'”

“But I always felt the movement had an idea and a life of its own,” he says. “Culture itself is sentient. Hip hop, collectively, is now a multi-billion dollar industry that has rocked the world.”

“Skateboarding and extreme sports faced the same arguments,” according to Holman. “There were protests against the idea of ​​an art form being ‘judged’, with points and grades. I’m sure figure skating suffered the same in the 1930s.”

“But think about the fact that it’s a movement created in New York City — the capital of commerce, the heart of capitalism. To question its path to competition and commercialization is, to say the least, naive.”

Arguments aside, breaking’s remarkable battle from the sidewalks of the Bronx to the Olympic arena is rewarding for Holman—one of the few people who understood the potential of hip hop’s power moves and poetry more than four decades ago.

This text was originally published here.