The introduction of Paris into the 2024 Olympics may have surprised many, but for Michael Holman – writer, producer, artist, entrepreneur and self-dubbed hip-hop pioneer – it was the realization of a 40-year vision.
The games website describes breaking as a “hip-hop” style of dance characterized by ‘acrobatic movement and stylized footwork’.
This format is fundamentally different to ice dancing or gymnastics. Athletes don’t wait their turn to perform one by one and impress the judges.
Instead breakers go to the floor in pairs in Paris, “fight” and outdo each other’s moves to medal.
In the early 1980s, Holman ran a weekly hip-hop revue at a downtown Manhattan club that combined rap and graffiti with a new form of street dance.
First, it’s about performance. The breakers were dancing, the audience was clapping, the next act would appear later in the evening.
But Holman insisted on adding one more element to his booming club night.
“New York is about competition and trying to be the best,” he said. “And I want to bring another crew to the battle. I want the audience to see the battle, not just the movement.”
That’s what Holman saw on the streets of the Bronx months ago. There, breaking emerged as a form of dance fighting, originating from changing gang tensions in 1970s New York.
“There were the Ghetto Brothers and the Black Spades, the Savage Tramps and the Savage Skulls. And they’d been bleeding for years: breaking heads, killing, stabbing each other,” he said.
“Then, in 1971, Yellow Benzie – the leader of the Ghetto Brothers – forced a deal that allowed guys and gals from rival gangs to get together and party.”
While dancing at these parties replaced violence as an outlet for neighborhood bravado, many of the city’s cultures fostered breaking creativity.
Holman continued: “Breakers were looking at other breakers: ‘Wow, that’s wild. The way you’re bringing kung fu moves from the Chinese community. I’m going to combine your kung fu and put it with my African cakewalk dance, or combine it with the beauty of Puerto Rican gymnastics. And it’s all Jamaican. While dancing to old James Brown records on style sound systems. That’s the culture of b-boy dancing.”
The first band of breakers to inhabit Holman’s nights was a group he informally called the “Rock Steady Crew”. Initially, he was loathe to share the stage with a rival outfit, but eventually he yielded to Holman’s requests.
“I brought down a crew of ‘floor masters’ and boom, it was a historic moment,” Holman said. “The ‘Floor Masters’ focused more on athleticism and speed and power and when I saw them battle, I dropped the ‘Rock Steady Crew’ like a hot potato.”
Holman helped form and manage a new breaking crew that focused solely on ‘power’ moves as witnessed by the ‘floor masters’.
He recruited the best dancers from the best crews across the city’s five boroughs and named the new group the ‘New York City Breakers’. It featured some of the art form’s best exponents: Noel ‘Kid Nice’ Manguel, Matthew ‘Glide Master’ Caban and Tony ‘Powerful Pexter’ Lopez.
Together, they took braking to a whole new level of skill.
“I got rid of the weaker dancers and attacked three or four other crews from the city. I created a super crew of power breaking,” Holman said.
“The breakers were able to like the gyroscope. They started doing the footwork and then dropped to the ground and using some kind of internal propulsion, mixed with ground friction, simultaneously balled themselves up in a certain way or spread out in a certain way, they created an internal force.
“He was able to turn and make these flames. He found a new way to move and it was pure poetry.”
Holman first arrived in New York in 1978 from San Francisco. Despite working at a bank on Wall Street, “wearing Brooks 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 in Hudson [Street] and Chambers [Street],” he said. “I get off the elevator in the morning and I see Joey Ramone [lead singer of iconic punk band The Ramones] – Coming from a late night party with a girl on each arm. It was crazy.”
Holman soon became part of the scene, becoming friends with pioneering graffiti artist Fab Five Freddie, and frequenting nightclubs such as Max Kansas City, the Mud Club, and CBGB’s; Places that allowed him to mingle with musicians, poets and other budding artists.
“I ate like ice cream in New York,” Holman said, recalling when Holman saw the first signs of the new street culture around him as he walked back from a night of partying.
“I was half asleep waiting for the subway. And then this train pulls into the station and is covered from top to bottom all over the windows with graffiti logos and burners. [large, elaborate designs in spray paint]. And I had never seen anything like that before, it was a crazy message from the street. It was devastating, but beautiful at the same time.
“Little kids are saying: ‘Look at me. Look at what I can do. I’m nobody. OK, so this city has the United Nations, it’s the capital of media and finance, but I’m a kid from the Bronx, and I have a game!'”
For Holman, this ethos was also behind the emergence of hip-hop and Breakers’ compulsion to express themselves through dance.
“It’s about, look at me, I’m somebody,” he said. “I can take a microphone and write my own poetry, I can cut and scratch a turntable, I can shake the floor like a b-boy, I can pull off head turns you can’t even imagine.
“The kids were creating their own universe with nothing but two turntables, a mic and a piece of linoleum.”
As Holman produced music, shot films and soaked up the energy of New York, he wondered if the city’s small hip-hop and breaking scene could become a break-out trend, similar to the punk that had emerged in London and New York in the previous decade. .
“A friend of mine went to school with Malcolm McLaren in the 1960s,” Holman said.
“When McLaren visited New York, I invited him to a block party in the Bronx with Afrika Bambaataa and Jazzy Jay. I took him to Park Jam, where the DJs had their sound systems and the b-boys and b-girls went to dance.
“Malcolm was blown away and so he asks me to put the review together. Well, I did it.”
McLaren had a great instinct for revolutionary cultural movements. He played punk figureheads Sex Pistols after releasing his anti-monarchy single ‘God Save the Queen’ in 1977 to coincide with Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee.
He put Holman in touch with English-born promoter Ruja ‘Cool Lady’ Blue, who had a regular night at a Jamaican-owned Negril nightclub.
And by November 1981, the nightspot was rocking to Holman’s DJ friends and The Rock Steady Crew Breakers.
When word got out about his spectacular performances at hip-hop nights, the newly formed super-troupe, and Holman’s Negril nights, the New York media began to take notice.
“Well, what we were doing became the flavor of the month for these international broadcasting companies,” he said. “In New York you’ve got documentary crews from all over the world: BBC, Canal Plus, NHK, Rai TV and ZDF.
“They go shoot Breakers, package it up and send it back to wherever they’re from. And it goes on the news that night. So you’ve got kids in London and Tokyo and Paris exposed to hip-hop culture before kids were in Pittsburgh.”
Holman decided to do some of his own stuff. In 1984, he created and presented the TV show Graffiti Rock, a hip-hop-dedicated music program along the lines of the successful Soul Train, which featured New York City Breakers, Run-DMC, Kool Mo Dee and Special K.
“It was the world’s first hip-hop TV show,” Holman said.
The New York City Breakers also crossed over into the Middle American mainstream. He has appeared on The Merv Griffin Show – a popular American talk show – CBS Evening News, Good Morning America and Soul Train. He appeared in the music video, pulling a move as soul legend Gladys Knight sang Save the Overtime (For Me).
The last major event Holman booked for the New York City Breakers was in 1987 at the London Contemporary Dance Trust.
“By then the gigs were dying. It seemed like a passing fad. The media moved on and the breakers started going their separate ways,” he said.
But elsewhere the party continued.
“Like a lot of cultural movements like jazz, rock ‘n’ roll and the blues start in America; they die here only to find new life and a new identity overseas. The same thing happened with Breaking,” Holman added.
By the late 1990s, Holman was receiving invitations to hip-hop conventions around the world, with interest in Australia, Asia, Europe and South America.
He organized panels and lectures on the Breaking movement, watched Breaking films and participated in dance workshops where original dancers were asked to appear.
A young Polish dance crew showed off the moves they learned from Graffiti Rock. But not all breakers were welcome.
“I was getting a lot of screwy looks from some of the breakers when I showed up,” Holman said.
“They were saying: ‘Oh, you’re trying to push this as a sport, you’re trying to kill an art form.’
“But I’ve always felt that a movement has a mind and a life of its own. The culture itself is soulful. Hip-hop is now a multi-billion dollar industry as a whole that has impacted the world.
“There were similar discussions about skateboarding and extreme sports. There was resentment about ‘judging’ the art form with points and scoring. I’m sure figure skating was the same in the 1930s.
“But consider the fact that this is a movement created in New York City; the capital of commerce, the belly of the capitalist beast. It’s better to question its approach to competition and commercialization.”
Debate aside, the remarkable battle of breaking from the sidewalks of the Bronx to the Olympic stage is a delight to Holman, one of the few who grasped its power-moves and poetic potential four decades ago.