BREAK-DANCING

noun Also written breakdancing or break dancing (Lifestyle and Leisure) (Youth Culture) A very individualistic and competitive style of dancing, popularized by Black teenagers in the US, and characterized by energetic and acrobatic movements performed to a loud insistent beat; abbreviated in the slang of those who dance it to breaking. Etymology: Formed by compounding: the dancing that was developed specifically to fill the break in a piece of rap music (i.e. an instrumental interlude during which the DJ would be busy mixing, sampling, etc.). In Jamaican English, to broke up has meant 'to wriggle the body in a dance' since at least the fifties; in the Deep South of the US a breakdown has been the name for a riotous dance or hoedown (with an associated verbal phrase to break down) since the middle of the nineteenth century, but the connection between rap music and the development of break-dancing in New York was so close that these older dialectal uses are unlikely to have had much influence. History and Usage: This style of dancing was pioneered during the late seventies by teams of Black teenage dancers (notably the 'Rock Steady Crew') on the streets of the south Bronx area of New York; each team (or crew) worked in parallel with graffiti artists, and the combination of music, art, and street entertainment that they developed formed the core of the new Black street culture called hip hop. By 1982 the phenomenon had been taken up by the press and widely publicized (to such an extent that by the mid eighties there was talk of over-exposure in the media and breaksploitation, an alteration of the more familiar word blaxploitation 'exploitation of Blacks'). To connoisseurs, breaking is only one of a number of styles of movement making up the highly competitive dance culture; others include body-popping, the lock, and the moonwalk. In breaking itself, dancers spin on the ground, using the body like a human top, and pivoting on a shoulder or elbow, the head, or the back. The craze quickly spread to other parts of the world and began to lose its association with Black culture. The noun break-dancing was quickly followed by the verb break-dance (simply break in Black slang use) and both these forms also exist as nouns; a person who break-dances is a break-dancer (or breaker). While Freddy lays down chanting, talking, rhythmic rap, the Break Dancers break, trying to out-macho one another. They jump in the air and land on their backs, do splits and flip over. Washington Post 4 June 1982, Weekend section, p. 5 They are young street dudes, nearly all of them black, anywhere from 10 to 23 years old, and what they are doing is a new style of dancing known as 'breaking' or 'break dancing'. Daily News 23 Sept. 1983, p. 18 In Leningrad the Juventus Health and Sports Club has activities from Aikido wrestling, skateboarding and break-dancing to tennis. The Times 5 Apr. 1989, p. 46 It seems any moment they will break from this 4,000-year-old tradition and spin off into a lively breakdance. Burst of Excitement (California Institute of Technology) Mar. 1990, p. 3