‘This is dance. It is an art form’: Breaking and its origins take the Olympic stage

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Andscape at the Olympics is an ongoing series exploring the Black athletes and culture around the 2024 Paris Games.

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PARIS — Jeffrey Louis’ parents were not pleased when they discovered that their youngest son had not just taken up breakdancing but had become obsessed with it. As proud Haitian immigrants, they had a vision of the American dream, and this was not it.

“My parents didn’t want me breaking at all,” Louis said earlier this week. “We came from Haiti, we came here for opportunity. So, when my parents found out that I was breaking, it just didn’t seem like the best choice as far as creating a career path.”

His parents came around in 2022 when Louis qualified for the World Games. His sister sent him a video of his mother dancing while he was competing. “That’s when I realized they had my back,” he said. “From there on I was really able to go on and fully focus on breaking.”

On Friday, Louis’ family will be in Paris watching him make history as a member of Team USA’s inaugural Olympic breaking team. Louis is an Olympian and a pioneer. The University of Houston grad is a hometown hero.

“I’ve been received really well,” he said. “I have a strong community behind me in my city. It seems like the whole United States has started following through and getting behind this whole movement.”

Louis and his Olympic teammates, Logan Edra, Victor Montalvo and Sunny Choi, will uphold the honor of a discipline that was created in the Bronx neighborhood in New York, by young African American dancers in the early 1970s. The art form has become a global phenomenon. While that has been great as far as growth is concerned, there is pressure to represent.

Just as the U.S. men’s and women’s Olympic basketball teams are expected to win gold, the U.S. breaking team feels pressure to win gold in an art form that was created in the United States.

“I live in New York, so I get, ‘You don’t have a choice, you got to bring it home. You have to represent,’ ” Louis said. “There are moments where I’m like, ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’ But I have to remember, one, I’m here, I’m representing and two, at the end of the day, they’re going to be happy for me no matter what. But I’ve had to kind of work through that, because initially that was something that I really struggled with. Going to jams and just hearing that over and over again. It’s like, ‘But what happens if I don’t [win]?’ But just being here, we’ve already made it we’ve already won.”

The narrative of whether breaking is art or sport has emerged as a source of concern, if not controversy in elements of the breaking community. Purists don’t want the dance to be a sport. They do not want to forget dance and its connection to music and rhythm. Some question whether breaking being in the Olympics will take away from the culture and the essence of breaking.

“I think that if you have the right representatives, it’s not going to take away,” Louis said. “It’s only going to put it in the best light possible.”

Montalvo was clear that while breaking has been accepted as an Olympic event, it remains an art form. “First of all, this is a dance,” he said. “It is an art form, so it’s not about who’s the fastest, who’s the strongest. It’s about who has more showmanship, who has more originality, character and creativity.”

“We’re still athletic and were artists. We’re both, so for us it’s about being ourselves and keeping the essence alive,” Edra said.

The competitive element of sport won’t hurt the art because breaking has always been fiercely competitive. “The battles have always been part of breaking,” Edra said. “As long as we tap into that spirit and that energy of the battle, that’s part of it. That’s why breaking’s special. There’s nothing else that has the battle part of it and the dance is part of it.”

Inside and outside of the breaking community, reactions varied when the International Olympic Committee announced that breaking would become an Olympic sport.

Choi, a Wharton School graduate, was skeptical. “Initially I was like, ‘This can’t be real,’ not because I don’t think that breaking fits in, but it didn’t match in my mind, what the Olympics represented to me. I saw it as this kind of platform for these very refined and elegant sports.”

Choi’s dream was to be an Olympic-caliber gymnast. In her mind, breaking was the complete opposite of gymnastics.

“It’s just like really cool, vibrant culture started in the streets,” Choi said. “It’s a little bit gritty but still really raw. Imagine that in the Olympics. It just didn’t work for me initially.”

The momentum grew and breaking was added to the Paris Olympics. Choi had to make a choice, and she took up breaking. To pursue her childhood dream of going to the Olympics, she would go to the Olympics as a breaker, not a gymnast.

My first thought when I heard the news was “appropriation,” not because I studied breaking but because of how throughout history African American ingenuity and style has been stolen, marginalized and appropriated. I wondered how an urban underground grassroots art form, invented by African Americans and refined by Latin dancers — now embraced by the world — wound up in the Olympics.

Would breaking’s Black roots be acknowledged or erased?

These are the questions that prompted Serouj “Midus” Aprahamian to examine breaking history to make sure its Black roots are not erased. Aprahamian, an assistant professor of dance at the University of Illinois, was part of the breaking scene of the 1990s. He was born in Lebanon and came to the United States with his family at age 5. He grew up Rowland Heights, a small city, in the San Gabriel Valley of Los Angeles County.

Now 43, Aprahamian has been involved in breaking and underground hip-hop dances since the 1990s, when he began breaking as a teenager. As a practitioner, especially after the commercialization of breaking in the 1980s, pioneers from the 1980s encouraged Aprahamian to dig into the history and find out where the dances he was doing came from. They cautioned him to not to treat them as a fad or a spectacle.

“So as a practitioner, looking into these questions of where the dance started, there was a bunch of contradictions, not just with breaking, but all of hip-hop is poorly disseminated,” he said. “Media narratives, even scholarly narratives, are pretty inaccurate.

“I basically had an opportunity to do a Ph.D. on this topic, and most of it is just driven as a practitioner wanting to know where this stuff comes from.”

His dissertation became a book, The Birth of Breaking: Hip-Hop History from the Floor Up. His goal in writing the book was to set the record straight. Aprahamian wanted to go beyond the narrative that breaking was something that began in the Bronx and was a Black and Latino innovation. Breaking was Black at the beginning.

“One thing that was clear was when breaking started, it was a Black thing,” he said during a recent interview. “But nobody ever talked to those individuals. So, it’s like their stories aren’t accessible.”

Thanks to social media, Aprahamian was able to track down some of the early breakers and go beyond well-known names. He interviewed some of the 1970s pioneers whose stories were never told, who were never known, who came before the era of the 1980s when breaking became documented and commercialized. These early breakers were undocumented geniuses and pioneers of what a global audience will witness in Paris on Friday and Saturday.

“We started hearing names of Kool Herc’s parties being the epicenter of the hip-hop and breaking,” Aprahamian said. “But then you start hearing the names of people that were there.”

He cited Keith and Kevin Smith, who called themselves the N—a Twins (now the Legendary Twins). “There was Phase 2, there’s all these names you would hear, and you would know they’re African American, but we never saw anything beyond just hearing their names. And then that alone was a question: Why don’t we know them beyond just hearing their names?” Aprahamian said.

To their credit, the members of this pioneering team of U.S. breakers are aware of the legacy they represent and the torch they carry for nameless generations of dancers who competed, not for medals but for pride and for a unique underground culture.

“For us it’s important to keep the culture alive, and to remember the roots of it and to bring that essence here to show the world,” Montalvo said.

Choi added, “One of the things I’m really looking forward to about breaking being in the Olympics is the additional exposure for our community. We understand that we wouldn’t be here without the culture, without the community that started all of this.”

Aprahamian is not sure that he will watch the two-day Olympic competition. He believes that other competitions throughout the year are equally as competitive but don’t have the Olympic brand.

“If I want to see high-level breaking, I’m not really going to tune into the Olympics,” he said. “For all the talk about how this is going to change everything, I personally don’t see what the big deal is. It’s a one-time thing. Los Angeles didn’t even accept breaking into its competition.”

That breaking won’t be at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics is a sore spot. But for Louis and his teammates, indeed, for every dancer/athlete competing Friday and Saturday, this Olympic breaking competition is a dream come true. And regardless of whether the United States wins the gold medal, Louis, Edra, Montalvo and Choi art part of a far-reaching homegrown legacy that has given a gift to the world.

The United States is responsible for this Olympic breaking party in France. The world has come here to celebrate and dance.