Back breaking

It’s in the MTV mainstream, boyee

By Sara Donnelly

Bruce Tracy holds a monthly breakdancing workshop, the next being Jan. 13, at Casco Bay Movers, in Portland. Call (207) 871-1013.

BEAT STREET BREAKDOWN: Bruce Tracy leads a variously talented crew in the uprock.

Decades after breakdancing was born on the streets of NYC and LA, pop music videos have pulled breaking back into the mainstream. Britney, Justin, squares, and hipsters alike all seem to want a piece of the b-boy style. For instance, about three months ago, a boy I was dating at the time whipped out a surprise electric boogaloo one night at a club. I found myself wondering: Just how did he make his arms ripple like that? And what was that bouncy hip-hop step anyway?

So, last weekend, three of my most enthusiastic and uncoordinated friends and I cancelled our Sunday plans of watching TV and got ourselves to Bruce Tracy’s beginner Breakdancing Workshop. Tracy offers his bootcamp for the uncool once a month at the Casco Bay Movers Dance Studio in Portland. For a mere $14, I hoped to acquire a bitchin’ new party trick and maybe even learn how to run up a wall.

Of course, it isn’t that simple. A frenzied 10 minutes into the workshop, Tracy turned to the class and smiled. “Breakdancing takes stamina and strength,” he said. “There is no breakdancing drink you can take to automatically make you a breaker.” Five minutes later, I was out of breath and on the floor, mimicking Tracy into what I thought was a set up for a headspin, but turned out just to be an ankle stretch.

I had barely survived the warm up.

At 23, I was the oldest student in the class. Excepting my equally aged friends, the average kid was 14 or 15 years old. There was a group of pre-teen cheerleaders, a cluster of 12-year-old aspiring b-boys wearing knit caps (apparently the studio was drafty), a couple of best friend pairs, and some wild-card solo artists. My friend Josh had an unfortunate position beside a nine-year-old breaking virtuoso.

Judging by the ages of the dancers, breaking is the hot new thing. Tracy attributes this to MTV and pop choreography that borrows from the breaking scene. “A lot of it is the simple fact that it’s on MTV all the time,” he says. “I turned on MTV and they had a thing on Limp Bizkit, remixed or some such nonsense, and at all the breaks [famous breaker] Mr. Wiggles was doing his thing. He’s locking, he’s popping. He was a commercial. The only reason they can’t do that with gymnastics is because everybody’s seen it already. Breaking’s just a little bit off the beaten path.”

Tracy himself has been breaking since he was seven, and has worked with some of the best breakers in the country. Recently, Tracy, a.k.a. Thunder, scored second place in the popping contest at a B-Boy summit in Roxbury, MA.

Back in the workshop, Tracy had us bouncing in a cross-over step-skip move called uprock. “This is what you do when you first enter the circle,” he explained. I briefly tried to envision myself entering a circle of potential breakers at a club or party, but the image required too much valuable concentration.

Uprock was the beginning of our “run.” A run is a combination of moves that a breaker does while battling or performing. A run can include popping, locking, six step — and pretty much anything else — and usually ends in a freeze or a power move. A run can also include a literal run, up a wall or the front of a particularly robust person.

Here are some of the basics: Locking is moving and freezing on the bass beat, like flipping invisible nunchuks then pausing to point at your buddy across the dance floor (hey, what are you doing at Liquid Blue?). Popping is most commonly understood by the moonwalk; the dancer isolates various muscle groups to move like a wave, or like an electricity conductor. The six step is where it gets tricky. This move gets you scrambling down on the ground, kicking your legs out in all directions. It is often used in battles and sets the breaker up for floor moves like pinwheels, windmills, and headspins.

Tracy took us through more than an hour of runs incorporating popping, locking, and uprocking before he took us to the floor. It was time to separate the men from the b-boys. The pinwheel took out notable members of the cheerleader and mini-homeboy contingent. Josh’s nine-year-old nemesis once again showed him up, and the guy to my left accidentally six-stepped me in the head. Perhaps it was the blow to the noggin, or maybe the dehydration, or the burning in my muscles, but as I sat back to watch the class scramble around on the floor I thought, hell, maybe groove really is in the heart.

Sara Donnelly can be reached at donnelly_sara@hotmail.com.