As a child, James Morrow wanted to dance.
He saw kids in the park breakdancing, and watched from afar; then, he would race home to try the moves in his grandparents’ backyard.
Later, he got closer to see what they were doing. First, he was by the swings. Then, he was at the monkey bars. Finally, another kid said to him, “Hey, you want to try this? You want to get in?”
Morrow seized his chance.
“I jumped in, and they all lost their minds, because I was practicing, and in my head, I was amazing,” he recalled. “But I was 10, so they were probably like, ‘this cute little kid, doing his best.’”
Morrow was captivated, and rode the wave of the hip hop zeitgeist that spread globally from its early origins in New York, Los Angeles and other US cities.
Now 48, he teaches dance at Old Dominion University, including a four-course series about history, context and fundamentals of hip hop dance. He’s come a long way since the kid practicing moves in Chicago, and so has the dance form he first fell in love with: breakdancing, or breaking, is an Olympic sport for the first time at the 2024 Paris games.
On Friday and Saturday,16 women and 16 men, known as b-girls and b-boys, will compete in solo battles to move forward in the competition and go for gold. Four dancers represent the American team.
Morrow said he has “mixed feelings” about breaking at the Olympic Games. On one hand, it’s exciting to see breakers celebrated on an international stage. On the other hand, he worries the event could be considered exploitative to the culture that birthed it and water down a genre based on fierce improvisation by turning it into set routines easily tabulated for scoring and point systems.
In the 1970s, hip hop grew out of the creativity of Black and Latino people from neighborhoods marked by economic oppression, overcrowding and public health crises — “specifically the Bronx, when Bronx was burning, literally,” Morrow said.
At a Bronx party in 1973, DJ Kool Herc spun the same record on twin turntables, extending percussion breaks. Others emulated it, creating beats MCs would rap over and dancers would move to.
Pillars of hip hop — DJing, MCing, breaking and graffiti — emerged from tough circumstances as a joyfully rebellious counterculture. That counterculture soon became mainstream as a multibillion dollar industry with global reach.
Now, it has a part at the Olympics, added in a bid to appeal to younger audiences.
“We have 32 incredibly strong, well-versed movers that are throwing down on an Olympic stage and demonstrating embodied movement in the most complex way,” Morrow said. “That’s amazing.”
On the other hand, Morrow worries about representation.
“Perhaps the originators of this sort of art form are watching this and not being seen,” he said. “That idea of being seen is a big part of the culture.”
Breaking may have its place at this year’s Games, but it won’t be a sport featured in 2028 in Los Angeles, when the Olympics arrive in the city that originated popping and locking breaking styles.
Morrow also wondered if the scoring system could, ironically, dilute the competitive nature that’s intrinsic to breaking.
At the Olympics, dancers will go head to head in battles and score against each other on creativity, personality, technique, variety, performativity and musicality. Judges also have a misbehavior button, which docks dancers’ points.
Morrow was leery of the button, wondering how much disses, burns or other classic forms of one-upmanship would earn competitors penalties.
“That’s where you see all that insane virtuosic movement getting born, is by each dancer challenging each other,” Morrow said.
Despite misgivings, he looked forward to seeing the 32 dancers poised to take the stage — and the podium.
“They’ve had to eat, sleep and drink breaking for them to be where they’re at, whether they’re from the Netherlands or Japan or Lithuania,” he said. Musing on international dancers, Morrow added, “There’s a lot of ways to traverse through hip hop and find connections.”
In that, perhaps breaking represents the Olympics’ highest aspiration to bring people and nations together.
