From street truce to Olympic battles – breaking’s 40-year odyssey

The introduction of the Paris 2024 Olympics entry might have surprised many, but for Michael Holman — writer, producer, artist, entrepreneur, and self-proclaimed hip-hop pioneer — it was the fulfillment of a 40-year vision.

The games’ website describes breaking as a “hip-hop” dance style, characterized by “acrobatic movements and stylized footwork.”

However, the format is fundamentally different from ice dance or gymnastics. Athletes don’t wait their turn to step out and impress the judges.

Instead, in Paris, breakers hit the ground in pairs, “fight” head-to-head and improve their moves to take home a medal.

In the early 1980s, Holman hosted a weekly hip-hop revue at a downtown Manhattan club that combined rap and graffiti with the new form of street dance.

First it was about performance. The breakers would dance, the audience would applaud, the night would go on and the next act would appear.

But Holman insisted on adding another element to his booming club night.

“New York is all about competition and trying to be the best,” he said. “And I wanted to bring another crew into the fight. I want the audience to see a fight, not just moves.”

Holman had seen it on the streets of the Bronx months earlier. There, breaking had evolved into a form of dance-fighting, born out of a shift in the gang tensions that had ravaged 1970s New York.

“There were the Ghetto Brothers and the Black Spades, the Savage Nomads and the Savage Skulls. And they had shed blood for years: banging heads, killing, stabbing each other,” he said.

“In 1971, Yellow Benjy – the leader of the Ghetto Brothers – enforced a truce that allowed the boys and girls of rival gangs to come together and celebrate.”

At these parties, where dance replaced violence as an outlet for neighborhood swagger, the city’s many cultures cultivated the creativity of Breaking.

Holman continued, “Breakers would look at other breakers and be like, ‘Wow, that’s wild. The way you bring in kung fu moves from the Chinese community. I’ll incorporate your kung fu and pair it with my African cakewalk dance, or incorporate it with a Puerto Rican gymnastics aesthetic.’ All while dancing to vintage James Brown records mixed on Jamaican-style sound systems. That’s the culture of b-boy dancing.”

The first group of breakers to reside on Holman’s nights was a group he informally ran called the “Rock Steady Crew”. At first they hated sharing a stage with a rival outfit, but eventually they caved in to Holman’s pleas.

“I took down a crew called ‘Floor Masters’ and boom, it was like a historic moment,” Holman said. “The ‘Floor Masters’ was a lot more about athleticism, speed and power, and watching them fight I dropped the ‘Rock Steady Crew’ like a hot potato.”

Holman helped form and then lead a new breaking crew that focused solely on the “power” moves he had witnessed in the “Floor Masters.”

They recruited the best dancers from the best crews in the city’s five boroughs and named the new group the New York City Breakers. It featured some of the best exponents of the art form: Noel “Kid Nice” Manguel, Matthew “Glide Master” Caban, and Tony “Powerful Pexster” Lopez.

Together they took breaking to a whole new level.

“I got rid of the weak dancers and ambushed three or four other crews out of town. I created a super crew of force breakers,” Holman said.

“The Breakers could like gyros. They started with footwork and then went to the ground and at the same time clenched in a certain way or clenched with some kind of internal drive mixed with the friction of the ground distributed in a certain way they would generate an internal energy.

“They were able to spin around and do these flares. They found a new way to move and it was pure poetry.”

Holman came to New York from San Francisco in 1978. Though he worked at a Wall Street bank and “wore Brookes Brothers suits every day,” he quickly fell in love with the grittier culture of the city he called home.

“I lived in a loft apartment on the Hudson [Street] and chambers [Street]”, he said. “I’d take the elevator down in the morning and see Joey Ramone [lead singer of iconic punk band The Ramones] – from a night party with a girl on each arm. It was crazy.”

Holman soon became part of the scene himself, befriending pioneering graffiti artist Fab Five Freddy and frequenting nightclubs like Max’s Kansas City, Mudd Club and CBGBs; Places where he could meet with musicians, poets and other emerging artists.

“I ate like ice cream in New York,” Holman said wistfully, recalling that he was returning from a late-night party of his own when he saw the first signs of a new street culture emerging around him.

“I was half asleep waiting for a subway train. And then this train comes into the station and it’s covered in graffiti logos and burners from top to bottom all over the windows [large, elaborate designs in spray paint]. And I had never seen anything like it before, it was insane news from the street. It was vandalism but beautiful at the same time.

“Young kids say, ‘Look at me. see what i can do I’m not nobody. Okay, so this city is home to the United Nations, it’s the capital of media and finance, but I’m a Bronx kid. and I have game too!’”

For Holman, this ethos was also behind the emergence of hip-hop and the breakers’ drive to express themselves through dance.

“It’s about, look at me, I’m somebody,” he said. “I can take a mic and write my own poetry, I can cut a turntable and scratch, I can rock the floor like a b-boy, I can do headspins in ways you can’t even imagine.

“Children created their own universe with no more than two turntables, a microphone and a piece of linoleum.”

As Holman made music, made films, and soaked up New York’s energy, he wondered if the city’s small hip-hop and breaking scene could become a game-changer like punk, which has been booming in London and London for the past decade New York had arisen.

“A friend of mine went to school with Malcolm McLaren in the 1960s,” Holman said.

“When McLaren was visiting New York, I took him to a block party in the Bronx with Afrika Bambaataa and Jazzy Jay. I took him to a park jam where the DJs set up their sound systems and where the b-boys and b-girls went dancing.

“Malcolm was blown away, so he’s asking me to put together a review. Well I did.”

McLaren had a good sense of revolutionary cultural movements. He had managed the Sex Pistols, who became punk poster boys after they released their anti-monarchy single “God Save the Queen” in 1977, coinciding with Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee.

He linked Holman to an English-born promoter in town named Ruza “Kool Lady” Blue, who was a regular night out at Jamaica’s NeGril nightclub.

And in November 1981, the nightclub rocked out to Holman’s DJ buddies and the breakers of the Rock Steady Crew.

As word spread of hip-hop nights, a newly formed super-troupe and their amazing breaking shows at Holman’s NeGril nights, the New York media took notice.

“Well, what we did became flavor of the month for these international broadcasters,” he said. “You have documentary teams from all over the world in New York: the BBC, Canal Plus, NHK, Rai TV and ZDF.

“They film The Breakers, package it up and send it back to where they came from. And it’s on the news tonight. That’s how you introduced hip-hop culture to kids in London, Tokyo and Paris before they were even kids in Pittsburgh.”

Holman decided to create his own content. He created and hosted the 1984 TV show Graffiti Rock, a hip hop music show modeled on the hit Soul Train, which starred Run-DMC, Kool Moe Dee and Special K along with the New York City Breakers.

“It was the world’s first hip-hop TV show,” Holman said.

The New York City Breakers have also transitioned into mainstream Central America. They have appeared on The Merv Griffin Show – a popular American talk show -, the CBS Evening News, Good Morning America and Soul Train itself. They were featured in a music video making moves while soul legend Gladys Knight sang Save the Overtime (For Me).

The last major event Holman booked for the New York City Breakers was at the London Contemporary Dance Trust in 1987.

“By then the gigs were dying. It was seen as a passing fad. The media had moved on and the breakers started going their own way,” he said.

But elsewhere the party continued.

“As with many cultural movements that start in America, like jazz, rock ‘n’ roll and blues, they die out here only to find a new life and identity abroad. The same thing happened with the Breaking,” added Holman added.

In the late 1990s, Holman began receiving invitations to hip hop conventions around the world, with interest in Australia, Asia, Europe and South America.

He hosted panels and lectures on the Breaking movement, watched Breaking films, and participated in dance workshops where the original dancers were asked to perform.

A young Polish dance group even made it a point to show him that they had learned a routine from graffiti rock, movement by movement. But not all breakers were so inviting.

“I used to get a lot of twisted looks from some of the breakers when I showed up,” Holman said.

“They would say, ‘Oh, you’re the one trying to push this as a sport and trying to kill the art form.’

“But I’ve always felt that the movement has a spirit and a life of its own. The culture itself is sentient. Overall, hip-hop is now a multi-billion dollar industry that has impacted the world.

“There were the same debates about skateboarding and extreme sports. There was an outcry at the thought of an art form being ‘graded’, with points and points. I’m sure figure skating was the same in the 1930’s.

“But just consider the fact that this is a movement that started in New York City, the capital of commerce, the belly of the capitalist beast. To question their path to competition and commercialization is naïve at best.”

Debate aside, Breaking’s remarkable struggle from the sidewalks of the Bronx to the Olympic stage is satisfying for Holman, one of the few who realized the potential of his power moves and poetry more than four decades ago.