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Photo: Courtesy of Stefaun Tingley
B-boy stance
Being a break boy in Saskatchewan by ADAM HAWBOLDT
T
he video is grainy. At times, a tad wobbly. In it, Terrance Bear (aka T-rok) is spinning on his head. Dressed in a button-up shirt and jeans, he starts out with his legs spread wide, almost in the splits. The crown of his head on the ground. With his neck straight, jaw locked, Bear taps the ground with his hands, pushing himself in a clockwise direction. Tap, tap, tap. The faster Bear taps, the faster he spins. The people who have circled around him stand in silence. Bear bends his knees, puts his hands on his hips, and spins faster and faster, concentrating on keeping his back straight. The video clip is 13 seconds long. At around the half-way mark, Bear tucks his arms behind his head. The spin he’s in gets tighter, faster than your eyes can keep track of. And just when you think he can go no faster, Bear’s hands shoot out and plant on the floor. Next thing you know, Bear is on his feet. The onlookers cheer as he slowly walks out of the circle. No big deal. Terrance Bear is a b-boy. This is what he does. What some people call breakdancing. But
that isn’t what Bear calls it. Same goes for his friend, and fellow Skill Force Crew b-boy, Stefaun Tingley (aka Omega Flow).
It’s a frigid Saturday afternoon, about three years after that video of Terrance Bear was posted on YouTube. Sitting inside a downtown Tim Hortons, Bear’s boy Tingley takes a sip from his extra-large coffee and tells me he’s glad the term breakdancing came up in conversation. “That’s a very mainstream term,” he says. “It’s kind of looked down upon by people active in the b-boy culture. You see, b-boy technically means break boy. It’s a term for the dancers that, back in the day, would go out and get down to the breaks of certain jazz and funk jams. Like in a James Brown song, you’d have strictly a drum beat.” Here, Tingley stops talking. His hands begin to tap out a drum beat on the table in front of him, and he says, “So you’d have a break beat going like that, and these guys would go out and start rocking to that beat.” That was back in the late-’60s. By the early ‘70s in New York, DJ Kool Herc — the DJ credited with creating much of the foundational aspects
of hip-hop music — was dropping break beats, more people were dancing to them, developing their own style, and a new corner stone of the hip hop movement was born. These days breaking, or b-boying as those in the culture call it, looks markedly different that it did during the pioneering days. “B-boying has really evolved since then,” says Tingley. “It’s an evolution that has really wowed everybody. It’s almost like ‘How the heck did it come to this?’” Sure, there are still battles, dance competitions between individuals or crews. Sure, there are still cyphers, circles of people gathered around the breakers. And sure, the idea is still to hit your moves on the beats. But these days, b-boying is a lot more complex, a lot more dynamic and full of jaw-dropping moves than it was in the beginning. “Toprock and downrock were the foundations [of b-boying],” says Tingley. To show what he means, he gets up out of his chair and starts dancing in Tim Hortons to an imaginary beat. His legs moving fluidly in and out, side to side. His arms are swinging in rhythm. “This is toprock,” he says. “If there was a beat I’d be hitting the Continued on next page »
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