The Birth of Breaking

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"With around one million participants, breaking is the world's first and most widely practiced hip-hop dance -- and, as of 2024, an Olympic sport. Yet, despite its global reach and nearing 50-year history, narratives of breaking's origins have largely neglected the African Americans who founded it. Dancer and scholar Serouj "Midus" Aprahamian offers, for the first time, a detailed look into the beginnings of breaking in the Bronx. Unearthing new archival material, interviews, firsthand accounts of over 50 founding b-boys and b-girls, and detailed descriptions of the dance at its outset, The Birth of Breaking brings this buried history to life. Aprahamian explores embodied movement analysis alongside discussions of the early development and institutional settings where hip-hop was conceived. And by scrutinizing the movement's impact on sociocultural conditions in 1970s New York City, he reveals how indebted breaking is to African American culture and the disturbing factors behind its historical erasure." --