http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Slp5H8UNg7o
R-16 Korea: World B-Boy Championships 2011 Trailer [Source: sevenshadows1 ]
I’ve been checking out the R-16 Korea: World B-Boy Championships site and for the life of me I can’t figure out who won this weekend’s finals. It would be nice if they posted something that said “this year’s winners”. Know what I mean?
The above trailer for the event by Mason Rose is pretty darn cool:
“collage of R16 crew competition’s eight-participating teams (Korea, Japan, Russia, U.S.A., Kazakhstan, China, France, and Taiwan) busting off some fancy b-boying agilities and skills throughout the streets of Seoul, hotel lobbies, and R16 press conference halls.”
Charles Usher writes about R-16 for the Christian Science Monitor and claims that Korea is the “art form’s current epicenter.”
Hmmm, I in no way want to detract from the amazing developments in South Korean b-boying. The dancers there are amazing and have won other contests as well. The government supports them in a way you’ll never see in the United States where breakdancing was invented. Yet epicenter is a problematic term for a phenomenon that is marked more by it’s global dispersion than by a capitol.
The reality is, different crews at different events take the lead, as we see in the UK B-Boy Championships World Finals. Many of those winners are Korean, especially in the crew category. But a lot of those winners are something else. Breakdancing and b-boying is worldwide. It’s about a global community with many strongholds. Capitols ruled in the 20th Century. It’s time to move on.
Note: We’re talking about hip hop dance and not the synchronized, choreographed moves that one sees on America’s Best Dance Crew. That’s a development that took dancing to hip hop music away from what is now the traditional form of breakdancing which is also associated with the subculture of b-boying.