The freshest local breakdancers face off in ‘Princeton Breaks’

What’s the first thing you think of when I string these words together: Cow Face, Rich Nice, Crystal Meth Nuns, Harry Potter, Certified Circumcised, Suicide Flow, Cookies n’ Cream, and Saving Seven Dollars? You guessed it — breakdancing! Sept. 30 was a day to remember for all Princetonians, and it is not because grade deflation was repealed or because our valedictorian discovered the serum of immortality. Rather, it was a rare anthropological look into the underground lives of some of our classmates’ most interesting b-boy skills.

Last Friday, 11 crews from New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania arrived on the Princeton campus to battle it out with fancy footwork, explosive power moves and gravity-defying freezes. Normally, these battles are done by b-boys and for b-boys only, but Princeton’s Sympoh Urban Arts Crew showed a little courtesy (for which I am most grateful) and opened it to the public. I asked who was seemingly the only participant of female persuasion what she thought the chances of Princeton’s victory were: “We’re not going to win,” she said. She brought my hopes crashing down with a smile on her face, and I walked away knowing that my precious school spirit had just been battered across the sweat-stained stage floor.

Soon after the battle began, however, I realized that it didn’t matter who would win or who would lose, because there was something much more interesting. Not only were the contestants’ athletic acrobatics remarkable because of their sheer difficulty, but the emotional expression produced by each dancer shook the room. I found myself bobbing to the beat on the edge of my seat as I struggled to distinguish every fleeting move that was made on stage. Hands were flying, heads were spinning, backs were bending and through it all there was a constant demeanor of aggression, competition and mockery.

There is a “sense of heritage,” expressed by Sympoh’s own “Loose Goose” piece, in which people get together to express a fundamental hip-hop art form; 30 to 40 years of dancers and crews could inspire even more innovative combinations within the dance circle. And that concept was the most interesting aspect of the night. All the crews collectively — and quite naturally — formed a circle around the battle that was occurring in the middle. Even though there was a very conscious audience also enjoying the scene, the crews were used to closing their activities off from the rest of the world.

On a purely critical level, “Princeton Breaks” set off to a slow start. The lights and music were not functioning properly, and stalling occurred at a point where I predicted (incorrectly of course) that the show would not last an hour. But the moment the crews began literally flipping over each other and holding feet with necks while balancing on a pinkie (I’m not kidding), I couldn’t look away. The show made me laugh, shout, ponder sociological concepts of masculinity and, at times, jump in sheer terror. Bravo, Sympoh: Even though you humiliated Princeton on the scoreboard, you convinced me to take up breakdancing.