Breakdancers see their big break on the Olympics stage

Xinhua

Breakdancing will become an Olympics event at the 2024 Summer Games in Paris. If you are wondering what it's all about, look no further than the streets of Shanghai, where street dancing has become a popular form of entertainment.

Breakdancing is a street style that originated as part of hip-hop culture among African-American and Latino youth in New York City. Practitioners of the dance are called b-boys or b-girls.

By 2018, the number of street dancing practitioners in China had reached 3 million, and the number keeps growing.

Three months ago, Wang Wenlu, 33, a dancer from Shanghai-based Caster Studio, won a gold medal in breakdancing at the 14th National Games of China, after the genre was included in the competition for the first time.

For b-boys like Wang, the idea of competing in the Olympic Games was once a far-off dream.

Wang's fascination with breakdancing came while he was at middle school in his hometown in southwest China's Guizhou Province, according to Jiefang Daily. He saw someone doing the dance on the playground and joined in. After that, he sought only videos online and bought disks about breakdancing.

Every day, he spent several hours practicing. Now, dancing consumes his whole life.

"I'm gearing up for the Asian Games next year," said Wang. "If I can perform in the top four there, maybe I can rank even higher at the Olympic Games."

Li Yi / SHINE

Recognition on a global level like the Olympics is inspiriting b-boys and b-girls.

"We run for 5-10 kilometers, beginning at 5:30am every day," said Zheng Guowei, the coach of the Wang's Shanghai team. "During the five-month preparation for the National Games, our daily training lasted for eight to 10 hours. Now that street dancing is being added to the National Games and Olympic Games, we face more competition and more work."

The Olympics are "definitely good news for the whole street dancing industry," Lu Wei, director of popular "Street Dance of China" TV variety show, told Shanghai Daily. "The games will give this genre global attention. Its importance cannot be exaggerated because not all types of dancing have become Olympic events."

Street dancing has caught on in China because of its fashionable dress, stylish movements and interpretation of popular music, he explained. The core of street dance culture is "peace, love and respect."

Shanghai, as a national trend setter, has the advantage of the latest music in its clubs and a variety of dance schools.

More than 70 percent of universities in China have street dance clubs, and schools like the Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts have created majors in popular dance, including street dancing.

The Shanghai alliance of the China Hip-Hop Union Committee, under the China Dancers Association, was established in 2017 with only 26 members. It now has 106 members and 303 sites for teaching street dance.

Statistics from the China Hip-Hop Union Committee show that China had more than 5,000 street dancing schools in 2018, with 300,000 practitioners and 5 million people in training every year.

It's 9am in Yangpu District, and street dance teacher Xiao Junteng has a long 12-hour day ahead of him. Seven hours of teaching and five hours of commuting.

He doesn't mind.

"There is a lot of pressure," he told Shanghai Daily. "But I am motivated by love of dance and a dream, I can't stop pushing myself to keep progressing. If people always stay in their comfort zones, they become lazy."

Originally from Hunan Province, Xiao graduated from university in Guangdong Province in 2017, worked in Zhejiang Province for a year and then came to Shanghai.

This city, he said, is alive with opportunities for dancers – and especially street dancers.

The street-dancing craze in Shanghai has its origins in late 1987, when the Hollywood movie "Break Dance" was screened in the city. A decade later, the Sino-Japanese Shanghai New Idol Art School was founded, with a hip hop dance class included.

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When he is not teaching, Xiao attends dance classes taught by other teachers and does a lot of dance practicing. He participates in public performances, often in association with brand promotional events.

"This year I've made progress over last year," he said of his technique. "If I can create my own distinctive style, everyone will know that it's me dancing and that will make me very happy."

Xiao has two dance friends, Zhao Peng, a Shandong native, and Xiao Ao, originally from Anhui Province. Both were drawn to street dancing by the popularity of the genre in South Korea. The three friends have a common goal to create their own styles of dancing.

"My dancing is getting better and better," Zhao said. "I have developed my own style, which has to be perfected before others copy it."

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Shanghai has become a popular venue for street dancers from abroad. Christian Wu, a Chinese-American dancer from California, came to the city to continue his dancing career in 2018.

"It was definitely intimidating in the beginning," he said. "Although I speak Chinese, I can't read it. Everything was so new to me and there was so much to learn. But people were helpful to me."

Wu, now a dancing teacher at a school called BodySoul, has been dancing for 12 years. He said he was first drawn to street dancing by the US TV show "America's Best Dance Crew."

"I watched the show and fell in love with a group called Jabbawockeez," he said. "They wear white masks, and I just love their style. So I started learning their choreography. When I showed it to my friends, they said, 'Man, it's so cool!"

But Wu realized he needed to move beyond mimicking and began to develop his own style. He has put in long, hard hours of training, and along the way, learned how to teach other people to dance.

He likened street dancing with "telling a story."

"If you read a book, you see the story through your own eyes," he explained. if you hear a song, you are hearing it with your ears. I think dancing is putting the two together. You are hearing a story in the music, and you're seeing someone do a physical version of it."

Currently, the largest two local dancing studio chains are 5km and BodySoul. BodySoul has 14 branches all in Shanghai, and 5km has 17 branches across the Yangtze River Delta region. They both provides street dancing classes and training in other variations such as Bounce and Dos Hop.

Those attending the classes include students, office workers and housewives.

Housewife Lisa Liu, 36, said her life changed after taking the class.

"My children had basketball, but I had nothing for myself," she said. "Then I made up my mind to develop my own interest."

China's currently strongest dance style is called "locking."

It's a style of hip hop based on the idea of "locking," or freezing, a fast movement in a certain position and holding it for a short time, then resuming the same speed as before.

Dancer Xiao Jie won the locking world championship in 2019 at Juste Debout, an international street dance competition in France, TV director Lu said.

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Chinese dancers have their own characteristics, he explained. They are good at expressing the theme of their work and bringing imagination to their steps.

While the influence of Japanese and Korean genres run deep, Chinese street dancers have evolved their own style of street dancing. It doesn't mean that the dancers have to wear national costumes, dance to the music of traditional instruments or mimic the movements of folk dancing, Lu said.

"In our program, we see many dancers expressing Chinese-style content with their own dance styles." Lu said. "The most important feature of street dancing is integration, which brings new ideas, no matter whether its elements are classical dance, folk dance or modern dance."

His TV show, in its fourth season, concluded in October. It featured competitions with dancers from around the world. On YouTube, the show is subtitled in nine languages and has become a hot search on Twitter in Thailand, the Philippines and other countries.

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"For dancers, inspiration comes from many sources – a song, a painting or a scene from life," Lu told Shanghai Daily. "The more things foreign dancers experience, the more inspiration they find. They are deeply interested in cultures that they have never been exposed to before."

The dance work "Poems," by Ma Xiaolong and Japanese dancer Acky, portrays a street-sweeping monk skilled in martial arts. Verses by the ancient poet Li Bai figure in the work.

Taiwanese dancer Zhang Zhanrong, 41, who started dancing at 18 and has been in Shanghai since 2016, said the "collision" of different culture creates new ideas for dance.

While Shanghai offers great opportunities for young dancers, Lu noted that its relatively high cost of living can be a drawback for out-of-towners. Therefore, young dancers who want to gain a foothold here must have great determination and understand that achieving success can take time.

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