Battle!

Breakdancing is cool, I've always thought it was cool. When I was at school in Utah I took a breakdancing class at the field house, and I learned some cool moves, but they didn't offer a follow up course the second semester, and I never practiced the few moves I did learn and so any nascent skills I had never turned into anything. It's too bad, it's easy to think about how much time has passed since then and think about how good I could have potentially become if I had kept practicing a lot.

When I came to Korea, I knew that this country had a lot of skilled bboys, and I had the vague goal of finding some battles or events to check out but I never really remembered to look into it at all when I was killing time on the internet.

A while back I saw a trailer for a breakdancing documentary called Planet BBoy, and it was finally released on DVD, and thus made available to internet piracy, a couple months ago. After I downloaded and watched it, I got fired up on breakdancing and plunged into the internet to find some events going down in Korea, figuring a weekend trip up to Seoul was due anyway. After scanning through a bunch of crap results from Google late Friday night I found a forum that had a two-on-two battle listed for the following weekend at the Daegu YMCA. This was triply convenient since the timing was right, it was in my city, and it was at the YMCA where I went every Saturday for Korean-language classes anyway.

The next day I had my Korean class and confirmed the event and got super pumped up. The following weekend, after class and lunch, I showed up at the gym and there were a bunch of Korean people milling around, practicing and what not. The battle itself was quite long - first every team got a chance to battle another team, with the teams getting better later in the first round. It took at least an hour, and during the break before the next round a lot people left which was too bad since the following rounds were when the bboys broke out the big moves - the windmills and flips and choreographed two-man dances and moves using the other partner.

Here's a demo by one of the judges who is from the Gamblerz crew, a team that won the Battle of the Year in 2004, which is basically the World Cup of breakdancing, and the subject of the documentary Planet BBoy:



There was even a team of waygooks (foreigners) which was pretty cool to see, but only one of them was good even though they made it as far as the semi-finals. This was due entirely to the skill of the one guy, and particularly one move where he removed his hat in the midst of windmilling, put it in his mouth, froze the windmill, and flipped it with his mouth back onto his head as an ending move.

Here's another video of the other semi-final battle. Check out how ridiculously flexible the one team is:



The team in the foreground won and went on to the final battle for 300,000 Won. Too bad I never kept up practice from those classes in college, that could've been me on film. Except for the dudes on the really flexible team, I could never do that.