More than spinning on your head

Here’s something you may not know: people still breakdance. Another thing you may not know is that it is not really called breakdancing. Thankfully, Tyler “Sho’Ked” Wilson offers, “I’m’a break it down right now.” Wilson is a dance instructor at Flips and Fitness on Jones Creek Road, and on a humid afternoon in August, he’s serving as judge of Battle Royale III, a dance competition at the gym.

“It started in the ’70s as breakin’ or goin’ off,” Wilson says. “Now this hip-hop culture is from New York, not to be confused with funk style culture—poppin’, lockin’, backslides, moonwalk—that’s from California. We are gonna be judging on the original style of b-boy—the ‘b’ standing for ‘break’ because they dance on the breaks of the records, when the instruments just played—and top rockin’, influenced by the Latin and African Americans in the Bronx. It was called breakin’ then, but when it went mainstream in the ’80s people started calling it ‘breakdance.’ But it was never called that by the pioneers of it.”

The gym starts filling up half an hour before the competition. Dancers ranging from freckle-faced Dennis the Menace look-a-likes to bearded men stretch and bounce around the room as Corey Mallery, also known as “Funky Mojo,” spins James Brown tracks from his makeshift DJ booth. A couple of the event organizers attempt to sketch out a tournament bracket on a large sheet of butcher paper as one of the dancers manages to dance up all the available space in the room. The growing crowd of parents and girlfriends dotting the perimeter looks worried that a move is going to be busted in their direction at any second.

“Now what’s goin’ on, you have kids poppin’ off doing tricks and flips on one hand and on their heads,” Wilson says. “It’s a little bit different than what it was. It’s all still about dancing to the music.”

Wilson looks at breakin’ with a wider lens than most. He studied dance in New York with some of the pioneers of the form: Brian Green, Emilio “Buddha Stretch” Austin—who choreographed for Michael Jackson and Will Smith—and Richard “Crazy Legs” Colón of the Rock Steady Crew. Wilson explains that there’s more to it than just spinning around on your head.

“In the late ’60s and ’70s in the Bronx, what was goin’ on was a lot of violence,” Wilson says. “A guy by the name of Afrika Bambaataa got everyone together and said there has got to be a better way to save the children and do something positive. Out of that came uprockin’, a part of breakin’. Instead of bringing guns and knives to a fight, in an uprock battle, they imitate it—like pretend they have a knife, and whoever did it the best and to the music won. The person that loses, they go home and they practice and come back and have a chance of winning next time. Instead of bringing weapons to the fight, they brought their imagination. If you lose a battle in a gun fight, you lost.”

The room is completely full as the tournament starts with a showcase of all the teams signed up. I’m pulling for the Mustache Mob, a team with the sole female in the competition. This is a 2×2 battle, and teams of two take turns spinning and contorting at each other. Though they dance admirably, Mustache Mob is edged out. Leonidas and 300 defeat Vertical, Sleepless in Seattle beats Triversity in a tense showdown over a Latin Beat, and B-Boys United begin their smack-talking reign of terror.

As the single-hand bounce competition—the winner managed 41 bounces in time with the music—takes up the intermission, things start to get a little more serious. In the second round, Beyond Kings takes on Sleepless in Seattle in my favorite battle of the afternoon, one playfully confrontational until it results in a tiebreaker, putting Sleepless against B-Boys United in the final round. A windmill challenge happens in the interim, after which the dancers mop the floor with t-shirts like human Zamboni..

It’s so hot the bracket paper won’t stay taped to the wall.

There is a bit of good vs. evil theatrics at the end. B-Boys United infuses its choreography with insouciant posturing, their near-impossible moves passing within inches of their opponents while Sleepless seems focused more on their Moebius strip fluidity than on menace. Sleepless comes through in the end, with United and Beyond Kings following, but truthfully, the sweat-soaked dancers barely register the rankings. For all their practice, for all the swagger and acrobatics, this event is really about one thing: getting the chance to dance.