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126 13 B reokdoncing: A Reporter's Story Breakdancing is a craze that has easily surpassed the twist for media attention and wildfire popular diffusion - its energy and ambition seem to symbolize the 1980s. It is also a richly complex phenomenon to examine. First, breakdancing is not an isolated form of expression but is integrally linked to rapping (a form ofchanted poetry descended from black oratory), scratching (the music made from record-mixing techniques), subway graffiti, slang, and clothing fashion. To study breakdancing is to study an entire energetic urban adolescent subculture called hiphop, that has spread from New York City black and Latin ghettos across the United States and beyond the Americas to Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia. And to analyze breakdancing and hiphop is also to consider the ways in which the spread of that subculture has inevitably fragmented and distorted it and to note how the popular global media serve as both imagery for and agent of hiphop culture. Second, because breakdancing builds its unique style on the solid foundations of the Afro-American dance repertory, it opens a window not only on the present youth culture but also on the history ofblack dance on both sides of the Atlantic. Its study sheds light as well on the continuous process by which folkdance is transmuted into theatrical dance and vice versa. And further, in terms of its own short history, breakdancing is particularly compelling because new generations of dancers arise so quickly on the heels ofthe old. The telescopic story ofits permutations and transformations , as well as its tenacity and flexibility in the face ofvarious changes, lets us observe the vicissitudes of an oral tradition in an incredibly short time span. And finally, partly because ofits close relationship with the media, the observers and recorders of the form - myself included - are willy-nilly participants, since they have had such an enormous effect on its meteoric history. In the fall ofl980, I received a call from Martha Cooper-a photographer , a visual anthropologist who specializes in children's play, and a working journalist. For several years she had been documenting subway graffiti (her book, Subway Art, with Henry Chalfant, was published in 1984). She told me that as a staff photographer for the New York Post she had been sent to a police station in Washington Heights the previous winter Folklife Annual (1986) A Reporter's Story "to cover a riot." When she got there she found only a few dejected-looking kids who had been arrested for allegedly fighting in the subway when they claimed they were dancing. Marty's interest in them was fueled by seeing the confiscated cans of spray paint and martial arts paraphernalia that marked them as part of the graffiti subculture. According to the kids, the cops had to admit defeat, drop charges, and release them because the kids proved conclusively that they had, in fact, been doing a shared dance. Marty asked them to take her back to the subway station and show her their dancing moves. She photographed them and took down their phone numbers . When she called me, she was just getting around to looking them up and asked if I would be interested in writing an article about this kind of dancing for the Village Voice (where I frequently wrote about dance and performance). It was something she'd never seen before-solo performance with wild acrobatics and poses - and she found it hard to describe. But having a second look turned out to be harder than we bargained for. For one thing, these kids were shy about demonstrating their dancing for adults, even for two encouraging and sympathetic reporters. Their mothers disapproved of their breakdancing indoors, since they invariably knocked into the furniture, and they also disapproved oftheir breakdancing outdoors, since (although the dancing itself wasn't, after all, fighting) the activity seemed connected to all kinds of illicit behavior and institutionslike graffiti and street gangs. (The word crew replaced gang when the talk was ofgraffiti or dancing rather than fighting.) And the competitive nature of the dancing at times did lead, in fact, to actual combat. A further difficulty for our investigation was that these kidsmembers ofthe High Times crew- assured us that this kind ofdancing no longer interested them or their friends. It was out offashion, they insisted. Roller disco was now the going thing. They ran a little karate school in the basement of a neighborhood apartment building, where they finally hesitantly showed us...

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