Skip to main content

b-girls

By


I wouldn't have given Breaking a look had not there been a Lithuanian girl in the mix.  She went by the name of Nicka, short for Dominika, and has gotten a lot of attention here.  It was fun seeing Snoop Dogg lead the contingent of b-girls out into the ring for the final elimination round, although he's an LA boy, not a NY boy, which is where break dancing originated back in the late 60s.  I thought it had been forgotten until Millennials and Zoomers picked it up and turned into an international "sport," making its first appearance in the Olympics.

Sad to say the Americans were woefully presented in the early rounds by an Asian-American girl named Sunny, who kept getting in Nicka's face for no reason that I could see.  Nicka had to shield herself from one of Sunny's flying kicks at one point.  Maybe the badass American girl had confused breaking with capoeira?  It didn't matter, Nicka won her group and booked her place in the finals.

They staged the event like prize fights.  I don't recall this being the format of break dancing.  I remember guys walking the streets of Georgetown with their giant boom boxes, and when the mood hit them would set the giant stereo players down and break into a dance.  They usually had a few sheets of cardboard to lay on the ground so as not to get their expensive tracksuits dirty. 

Nicka had two Chinese girls to overcome to face the vaunted Ami in the final match.  Ami hailed from Japan and was undefeated in international competition.  At 25, she had 8 years on Nicka.  Personally, I thought Nicka outperformed her but Ami edged her out on the judges' scorecards, which were flashed in red and blue across a huge board shaped like a vintage boom box behind the nine judges.  Nicka had to settle for silver.  She seemed happy just the same.

Unfortunately, she won't have the opportunity to build on her performance because LA has nixed Breaking from the 2028 Olympics, despite a great turnout in the ring and a large television audience for the event.  I guess with no notable American star, what's the point?

However, I think there might be some renewed interest after the controversy the b-girls stirred.  Australian breaker Raygun looked woefully out of place among Zoomers.  The 36-year-old was painful to watch as she clearly didn't have the moves to compete at this level, but made the most of it with her "kangaroo" pose.  Kevin Fredericks took exception to Nicka's durang, which he considered to be cultural appropriation, but Nicka was probably the closest to the origins of the dance style and credits the OG's for inspiring her moves.  The Chinese girls looked like converted gymnasts doing floor exercises set to rap music.  Ami also stuck to the roots of the dance and wore a more safe baseball cap in her final match with Nicka. 

Not everyone was miffed by the Breaking.  Ice T found it exciting to see Breaking back in the limelight and gave praise to the b-girls on X.  It's funny to see this iconic African-American dance picked up by so many people around the world, much like rap.  One of the more poignant moments was when refugee breaker Talish donned a cape that read "Free Afghan Women."  She fled Afghanistan in 2021.  Unfortunately, she was disqualified for making a political statement so she never got to dance.

If nothing else, Breaking gained a bigger audience at the Olympics.  There were b-boys too but we didn't watch them.  The American fared much better in this competition, taking home a bronze medal.  Maybe Australia in 2032.  I just hope no more kangaroo poses.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Searchers

By
You are invited to join us in a discussion of  The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl.  The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics'  Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts.  The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories.  The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...
123 comments
Read more