Exer(or)cising Power: Black Bodies in the Black Public Sphere

Abstract

I have been asking myself, whatever happened to breakdancing? Where did the acrobatic dance form that legend tells us evolved in the South Bronx as a competitive alternative to gang violence go? I can still recall the awe with which underground London beheld Ritchie ‘Crazy Legs’ Morales perform a head-spin so devastating that it transformed the way that we heard the Rock Steady Crew’s celebrated signature tune. Thirteen years later, no breakers have become stars. The most visible dancer operating in the hip-hop spotlight is Heavy D, and for all his skill, breaking is not part of his repertoire, which has a far more orthodox show-biz lineage. Where dance sequences appear in black music videos they stay close to the rules established by Hollywood musicals and endorsed by prominent crossover performers like Michael and Janet Jackson and Mariah Carey, whose latest video-led assault on the charts — Fantasy, a bizarre collaboration with the Wu Tang Clan’s Ol’ Dirty Bastard — includes a particularly leaden-footed set-piece.

The circle of the dance is a permissive circle: it protects and permits. At certain times on certain days, men and women come together at a given place and then, under the solemn eyes of the tribe, fling themselves into a seemingly unorganized pantomime which is in reality extremely systematic in which by various means — shakes of the head, bending of the spinal column, throwing the whole body backwards — may be deciphered as in an open book the huge effort of a community to exorcise itself, to liberate itself, to explain itself. There are no limits — inside the circle.

Frantz Fanon