‘It’s not about Raygun’: Breakdancers speak out on Olympics row

The worst thing about the uproar that erupted when an Australian breakdancer received zero points for her performance at the Olympics was not the slightly bizarre “kangaroo hop” she performed, say the renowned, New York-based breakdance practitioner, mentors and coaches, Gabriel “Kwikstep” Dionisio and Ana “Rokafella” Garcia.
The particularly devastating angle to the whole mess – “frustrating, insulting, offensive” is how Rokafella puts it; “burning the scene” is how Kwikstep sees it – was that it completely overshadowed the other performers, some of whom did win medals and “made an incredible impression on that dance floor”.
It’s a huge shame, they say, because dancers such as Ami Yuasa (B-Girl Ami) from Japan who won the gold medal in the women’s (“b-girls”) breaking competition and Philip Kim (B-Boy Phil Wizard) from Canada who won a gold medal for the men’s (“b-boys”) competition, should have come away from the games covered in glory.
Many in the breaking community had hoped the art form would grow in popularity and attract a wider audience after the International Olympic Committee announced that it would become an official sport at the Paris 2024 games.
Instead, the art was roundly derided and mocked as the performance by university professor-turned-b-girl Rachael Gunn – known as Raygun in breakdancing circles – went viral on social media. The criticism even extended to a parody on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in the United States.
There were also accusations of cultural appropriation as Raygun – a white Australian – was seen as mocking breaking, which has roots in American Black and Latino culture. Malik Dixon, who is from New York but currently lives in Australia, told the Australian Broadcast Corporation (ABC): “It just looked like somebody who was toying with the culture and didn’t know how culturally significant it was being the first time in the Olympics and just how important it was to people who really cherish hip-hop and one of the elements of hip-hop, which is breakdancing.”
Paris Olympics 2024 was the first time breakdancing – called “breaking” – was classed as an Olympic sport. Breaking is derived from the word “break”, which refers to the instrumental sections of songs, particularly in funk, soul and hip-hop music. It was during these breaks that dancers would showcase their moves to the beat, hence the term “breaking”.
At the Paris Olympics, the breaking competitions – known as “battles” – took place at the city’s iconic Place de la Concorde, its largest public square and the designated “cool corner” for “urban” sports such as skateboarding, BMX biking and breaking.
Kwikstep and Rokafella, a married b-boy and b-girl couple who have been famous on the New York breakdancing scene since the 1980s when the dance style was still in its infancy, watched intently from afar.
Kwikstep has judged breakdance contests such as Battle of the Year in Germany, the Notorious IBE in the Netherlands and R-16 Korea and served as a commentator for the Red Bull BC One competition, one of the biggest international breakdance events, in Rio de Janeiro.
Rokafella is a professional hip-hop dancer and choreographer who has also judged many competitions and co-founded with Kwikstep the nonprofit Full Circle Productions, dedicated to teaching young people about the political roots and future of breakdancing. Neither was involved with the breaking competition at the Paris Olympics this year, however.
Al Jazeera talked to them about their impressions of this year’s event, the fallout when Raygun hit the headlines, and the fight for civil rights which lies at the root of their art.
Al Jazeera: What was your impression of the breakdancing at the Paris Olympics?
Rokafella: Now, with all this little firestorm backlash that’s happening, I’m frustrated.
Emotionally, this was an intense chapter in my breakdance life, my breaking life as a b-girl.
We had a watch party for the b-girl day, and so we were bringing the gathering, the New Yorkers and the community, to go through this moment together.
I tried my best to be as impartial and as open-minded as I could be, and I’m still being open-minded with it.
I do wish that the world would focus more on the amazing and excellent display that all the Olympians had. You know, I feel like the medallists in each of the categories should be the ones that are being pumped up and they’re not.
And so that part is definitely frustrating, insulting, offensive, and the people who are outside of the community who are weighing in, you don’t need to weigh in.
Kwikstep: We were excited that breaking was going to be on a world stage.
I’m an athlete myself. I’m a tumbler. An all-around gymnast. I play baseball, basketball, martial arts, all of that. And the best breakers I know have an athletic component to them outside of breaking. So I can see the attraction, it being on that stage, but there wasn’t a community component to it on the way there [to the Olympics].
[But now] there’s a lot of speculation about what went down. [That breaking] is not being included in the 2028 Olympics because of what happened here. That’s not true. The LA committee already made the decision about it not being included. Doesn’t make sense because it was born here in America.
[In the Paris Olympics] I think a lot of compromises were made on the way, and it’s why we have the fallout that we’re having.
I like what I saw, but it was very clean cut. They wanted culture. Now, if you want culture, it’s cute. You had a boombox. I like that you had the vinyl in the middle. We would have had graffiti artists do up that boombox. I would have had breakers come out of the tape deck, coming down into a ramp out of the radio. I would have had LL Cool J KRS-One as part of the ceremony.
I would have had Big Daddy Kane, everyone who had the courage to represent breaking before any of this happened. I would have had a contingency of multi-generational representation there from the 1970s all the way to now.
There’s attention on somebody [Rachael Gunn] who, you know, took the breaking skills and didn’t present it at the highest level.
And that right now is getting a lot of fuel, and it’s burning the scene. But what I say to people is, don’t let it burn you, use it as fuel to engage you, to figure out what you’re going to do with what you have.
So this fuel runs out with a young lady by the name of Raygun. What will be left over are the champions that took home medals, the ones who made an incredible impression on that dance floor.
Al Jazeera: What do you think of Raygun’s performance?
Rokafella: We watched the battle [breakdancing competition] live, but we’ve watched many battles, sometimes in person, sometimes with one of our dancers, our b-girls, competing.
The kangaroo hop, that was a surprise.
However, what I’m trying to get at is that in b-girl battles occasionally, but more often than not, you will get dancers who are not at a high skill level. In general, we all have to work hard and we have to train. In general, we’re doing the same steps, but mentally, physically, there’s a lot of differences here.
And so when people want to criticise her performance, we trust that the judges will see what we’re seeing. And no, she does not get to move to the next bracket, so we trust that.
Kwikstep: My initial reaction when I saw Raygun was, how did she make it into this, to begin with? What were the checks and balances? In every event, there’s people in last place, but nobody’s focusing on that for days and days, making it into memes. And they’re on talk shows and all of that kind of stuff.
Let me give you an example. So I have a young man who called me, and he was almost in, I can say, in tears. His voice was shaking because he owns a school teaching breaking in a rural area.
And parents came in and said, “Teach my kids the kangaroo.” And he said, “Please don’t come in here and say that to me. It’s very disrespectful.” They didn’t listen. Now they’ve been asking him to teach their kids the kangaroo and sending him memes. He called me, said, “I don’t know what to do because I think I’m going to lose all my students and their parents because this is all they want.”
And I told him, if you lose all of them, it’s time for you to do something else. Because they weren’t loyal to you to begin with. If they had empathy, they would understand you and say, you know what? You’re right, I’m wrong. And remind people that this dance is about Souljahs [a reference to Kwikstep’s and Roka’s Bronx based non-profit organization] in the trenches.
If you look at the headlines at that time, it said, “New York can drop dead.” They left us for dead, literally. And post-civil rights, where I watched leaders get assassinated, I’m listening to rhymes that say “I am a somebody” and I’m cognisant that that comes from what? Civil rights marches. I am somebody.
And so when you have all of this happening in my mind and in my soul now, here I come to watch the Olympics, and I’m watching people at the top of their game. Some things are missing, but I’m like, it’s cool. The movement is what I’m watching. This is not just about moves. It’s about the movement of the people.
But then they chose to focus on her instead of, you know, Logistx or Sunny or Nicka, for that matter, who’s killing the game. They were incredible. And so you take away all the momentum to focus on this one person who doesn’t have the skillset. But it’s almost like a knee-jerk instinct to make a parody of a Black and Brown dance, because that’s what you were taught how to do. That’s not cool.
And I really feel bad for Raygun and what she has to deal with, because mental health is a real thing. And as a community, we come from a place where we’re mentally up against the wall, and this dance and music healed us. And so to turn around and take this very same culture and beat somebody up with it is not the right thing to do.
Al Jazeera: Tell us a bit about how breaking evolved.
Kwikstep: So breaking, in its first incarnation, started in the early 1970s … We were fortunate enough to be exposed to Lindy Hop [on TV] – it’s a dance that comes from the African-American contingent that was being done to swing music.
Rokafella: In the 1930s.
Kwikstep: And you had jazz, swing, bebop music. And you listen to the word bebop, it sounds a lot like hip-hop. And when people say, let’s go to the hop, that’s like saying, let’s go to the jam.
So Lindy Hop swing, there’s a clip called hell is a popping.
When you look at this footage, see the video? That energy is like breaking energy, but it’s not breaking.
When you look at it like that – you know – shuffling in the sand and being quiet and the chains come off. Now you’re tapping sort of works and you hear, “I’m here.” The Nicholas Brothers, the Barry Brothers.
It’s like watching your aunt move her hips while she’s cooking. There’s a sense of ancestry and knowledge being passed down to you.
When you look at hip-hop, it’s like rock and roll. You’re rocking and you’re rolling to that rhythm. Rhythm and blues, we’re doing these rhythms because of the blues.
When I look at the African-American dynamics and Afro-Caribbean dynamics, and when we saw one another. When hip-hop was being born, before it was called hip-hop, there was a social exchange happening.
You’re watching Lindy Hop, you’re watching swing music, you’re watching the big bands, you’re watching tap, and you go down with these moves in your head, and now you’re rocking to this music that’s jazz, It’s disco, it’s funk, but it’s the highest part of the music called break beats. And you’re actually reliving through your ancestry in the moment, doing similar moves.
Rokafella: The phase of the civil rights movement which also bled into Puerto Ricans standing and marching right there with the Black Panthers in New York City. So we were coming out of this and we were trying to find respect from our city officials and the government and at large.
And our leaders were assassinated. So we both marched together, and we both had to cope and endure the aftermath of that. And there were these music genres that were coming in quickly right after that. You had punk, which was also protest music. You had salsa, which really became very politically heavy with messages about South America, about the Caribbean, about America being a coloniser. You’ve got disco.
You’ve got the Black is Beautiful movement. You’ve got Puerto Ricans bringing their congas to different basement parties. It’s like a wave of pride that comes up at that moment which stems from the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
We got the city, which isn’t funded, so fire stations are closing. Arts programming is being cut. We’re not accommodating or catering to you, but we have to feel like we’re still here. We’re surviving the fires. Right after fires, you have crack, right after that, you’ve got AIDS, you’ve got the three strike laws, you could easily get stopped and frisked and locked up for just holding a joint.
And then you’ve got the DJs, you’ve got the dancers, you’ve got different cultures coming together. There’s this whole vibe that’s happening in New York City that really does catapult the artist to rise.
It was like the Latin, the Capoeira, the Bruce Lee, our lineages from African-American or Afro-diasporic traditions.
Al Jazeera: Which films and other source material would you recommend for those who want to learn about breaking?
Rokafella: I think that we can name a couple of films: Style Wars, Wild Style, Beat Street, Freshest Kids, Rubble Kings, A Decade of Fire. The book Can’t Stop Won’t Stop by Jeff Chiang. Imani Kai Johnson just put out a wonderful book [Dark Matter in Breaking Cyphers: The Life of Africanist Aesthetics in Global Hip Hop].
There’s definitely a lot in terms of crews from back then that don’t get the notoriety. Incredible Breakers, Fresh Kids, Furious Rockers, Scrambling Feet. You got Rocksteady Crew, New York City Breakers and Dynamic. We got the people who were definitely a force on the underground to reckon with.
And they didn’t get the cameras on them. They didn’t get the movies or the tours, but they were definitely people who could take you out in a circle.
So in the end, when you really ask yourself, how come there’s so little Black and Latin and Puerto Rican representation at the Olympics. The whole entire landscape. It’s because there’s no support, there’s no investment.
I have mouths to feed. We got bills to pay. We have to live. There’s a whole health aspect that comes in with breaking, with dancing. I got to get the chiropractor. I gotta get acupuncture. And so all that to say that if people really, really have eyes, the issue is bigger. It’s much bigger.
Whatever lane you want to take breaking to, who’s funding that? We have to evolve and bring breaking into other realms and open up all the other chambers and chakras that we have as we walk in, as we walk with breaking.