In Reverence of Black B-Girls
When veteran breaker Ana “Rokafella” Garcia first took interest in breaking, she was initially hesitant to participate because of the predominance of men. Eventually, her desire to dance vetoed her fear, and she trained herself to break. She caught the attention of another veteran breaker by the name of Kwikstep, who offered to train her. “The guys were looking at me like, ‘Yo, don’t be giving her the keys to the kingdom, you know? This is a boys club!’ ’Cause I really wanted to battle all of the guys and let them know that we’re good and you need to stop treating us like dirt. I’ve got skills now — and the skills just speaks volumes.” Garcia, who grew up in East Harlem, and established the Full-Circle hip-hop theater dance company with Kwikstep, is frustrated with the limits of hip-hop dancing placed on Black women. “I am letting people know that you can be a woman and a bad-ass breaker. When you see me, you see excellence.”
Black women’s involvement in early breaking culture in New York City is scantly highlighted in hip-hop archives. The names of men of color involved in breaking’s inception and evolution, such as Crazy Leggs, Frosty Freeze, Joe Joe, Rubber Band, and Charlie Rock are often touted as pioneering hip-hop dance, with women of color as their cheerleaders. While female breaking crews existed in the 1970s and 1980s, such as the Dynamic Rockers, the Lady Rockers, and the Female Break Force, their recognition pales in comparison to all-male crews such as the Rock Steady Crew and Zulu Kings.
Conversely, Black women’s contributions to twerking aren’t ignored, but rather, are fetishized as an aspect of hip-hop dance, rather than breaking. Breaking is routinely gendered as a masculine form of dance, while twerking is feminized and sexualized by wider society. With twerking, it is easier for the hip-hop conglomerate to objectify Black women’s bodies in specifically in service of the male gaze and the selling of commodities, rather than strictly for our own pleasure. Breaking, with its aggression, competitive spirit, and street foundation, clashes with the music industry’s attempt to possess and shape Black women’s sexuality for its own racialized-patriarchal aims.
“Not surprisingly then, hip-hop dance has been categorized as a man’s dance, especially with the advent of break-dancing. In reality, there were b-girls and b-boys in equal proportions at hip-hop’s dance inception. These b-girls and b-boys provided the seeds for what we know now as hip-hop dance,” agrees Carla Stalling Huntington, author of Hip Hop Dance: Meanings and Messages. “At a b-boy b-girl session, [dancers] were competing with each other for showmanship and perhaps the respect of their crew, and took the opportunity to write some history. As b-boys’ and b-girls’ texts were taken up by media defined break-dancing, women were left out of the picture. The sad thing is that the competition for elements of pride and dignity did not translate into the same ideals for African-American [and Afro-Latina] women. Instead, what was translated was another placement of women into the role of sex object.”
Even when Black women in crews competed, the moves were noticeably feminine, and purposefully differentiated from men’s breaking. “Again, women who performed these moves were often considered masculine and undesirable or sexually ‘available’. Although these sexist attitudes regarding the acceptable limits of female self-expression are widespread, they are not absolute,” argues Gina Caponi. “In my interview with Crazy Legs and Wiggles, two Rocky Steady Crew dancers, Crazy Legs had no objections to any female dancers executing any moves, whereas Wiggles would ‘respect’ a female breaker but was not as comfortable [with women] exhibiting the same level of physical exertion breaking required.” When Black women did compete, it was most often against other women, as battling men was often frowned upon, as Rokafella’s narrative illustrates.
The overt exclusion of Black women from the historical formation of breaking illuminates the power dynamics latent in the culture. “[Hip-hop dance]…is a historical discussion of the continued exclusion from social interactions that allow for prosperity, wealth, security, and power,” adds Huntington. “These are the things money can buy.” Hip-hop is a method for men of color to acquire status and access into spaces that they’ve previously been denied — this means that Black women involved in any aspect of hip-hop culture, whether it was emceeing, DJing, writing graffiti, and breaking took a back-seat to masculine aspirations on the road to stardom.
Judi “JuLo” Lopez, a Jamaican born b-girl based in Toronto, aims to challenge this history. Consequently, due to the growth of hip-hop over forty decades, there are more Black women involved in breaking than in hip-hop’s early history, and Lopez plans to keep the interest building. She became involved in the culture while abroad in South Korea in 2011, and after her repeated bouts as a dancer, sought to establish a breaking culture for women in Toronto, where very few Black women and women of color were prominent as b-girls. Lopez’s program, KeepRockinYou’s Toronto B-Girl Movement, as it is aptly characterized, focuses on cultural talks, building skills, and demonstrating the liberation of breaking to young women: “We go through intense breaking — the foundations of breaking — learning top rock, go-downs, foot work, freezes, and then usually what we do is we have discussions after that. We talk about women in hip-hop. We talk about people empowerment.”
Lopez notes that one of her favorite aspect of the B-Girl Movement is incorporating the historical aspect of women’s role in the culture.“You need to know exactly why you want to represent, why you want to learn this dance in particular, so we really focus on building that leadership aspect in the program,” she divulged. “We had about 50 girls who went into the program, and now, more than anything, outside of this program, they are going out and they’re teaching, and they’re sharing their progress in dance and how they started.” Lopez is continuing the legacy of Black b-girls participating in a radical Black tradition, molding the talents of future generations of female dancers.
The impact of Black women’s involvement in the foundation of hip-hop dance must not be erased. The identities of early female pioneers might be obscured in hip-hop history, but the future generation of b-girls and gender-nonconforming b-folks are evolving the cisheteropatriarchal tint of breaking culture. These brilliant millennials are continuing the important cultural work that their predecessors created, but unlike those in the past with agendas to erase the existence of Black b-girls, we of the future assure they will not be forgotten.