Unconventional sports like breakdancing are breaking into the Olympics. Andrew Keh looks at what is lost and gained when an underground art form becomes part of a mainstream cultural event.
'Russian break dancers these days, they don’t know how easy they have it.
Sergey Chernyshev, 39, was reminiscing recently about starting out as a young B-boy in Voronezh. That was in the mid-1990s, before the internet shrank the world and the city still seemed a universe away from the wellsprings of hip-hop culture. Chernyshev’s only lifelines then were the VHS tapes that trickled in from the West.
“Someone would get a tape from abroad, and we would make copies,” Chernyshev said. “We would take something from one video, another piece from another video, and that’s how we learned how to dance.”
Things here have changed considerably, a point Chernyshev can illustrate today just by pointing across the room to his 18-year-old son, also named Sergey, who break dances under the moniker Bumblebee.
Last year, Bumblebee won the gold medal for boys at the first Youth Olympic break dancing event, solidifying his standing as one of the more promising young breakers in the world. When it was announced this year that break dancing would be added to the program for the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris — a development that produced predictable snark and puzzlement in some quarters — Bumblebee suddenly had a new life goal.' ... Keep reading on The New York Times
'Russian break dancers these days, they don’t know how easy they have it.
Sergey Chernyshev, 39, was reminiscing recently about starting out as a young B-boy in Voronezh. That was in the mid-1990s, before the internet shrank the world and the city still seemed a universe away from the wellsprings of hip-hop culture. Chernyshev’s only lifelines then were the VHS tapes that trickled in from the West.
“Someone would get a tape from abroad, and we would make copies,” Chernyshev said. “We would take something from one video, another piece from another video, and that’s how we learned how to dance.”
Things here have changed considerably, a point Chernyshev can illustrate today just by pointing across the room to his 18-year-old son, also named Sergey, who break dances under the moniker Bumblebee.
Last year, Bumblebee won the gold medal for boys at the first Youth Olympic break dancing event, solidifying his standing as one of the more promising young breakers in the world. When it was announced this year that break dancing would be added to the program for the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris — a development that produced predictable snark and puzzlement in some quarters — Bumblebee suddenly had a new life goal.' ... Keep reading on The New York Times