Breakdancing has finally made it to the Olympics. This recognition by the most exclusive of sporting institutions has been a long time coming. Breakdancing organizers first considered inclusion in the Olympics in the early 1980s.

Breakdancing is a martial arts and dance-based art form that originated in the working-class and lower-class culture of New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

With recognition at the Olympic Games, it has become a recognized and established form of competitive sport, which also includes figure skating, synchronized swimming and diving, as well as the recently added sports of skateboarding and snowboarding.

Breakdancing has always been a highly competitive, physically demanding art form. Those of us who grew up in the 1980s can’t forget body-popping and breakdance battles in the clubs of even our most unglamorous cities.

Breakdancing used to pride itself on its inclusivity, so why is it played at the Olympics but not the Paralympics?

Due to its origins, breakdancing was often combined with rap and scratch music, evolving into a competitive art form in itself, with spontaneous battles becoming legendary in the 1990s.

In the early years, there seemed to be very few rules in these competitions, or at least few written rules. Because breakdancing was not tied to an institution or membership organization, anyone from almost any background could compete for recognition. This gave breakdancing the feeling that it was for everyone and that everyone had the potential to succeed in it, no matter who they were or where they came from.

Despite these egalitarian beginnings, breakdancing has not made it into the Paralympics, the alternative form of the Olympics designed to celebrate the sport of people with disabilities.

It is a sad reality that people with disabilities are all too often excluded from such art forms, especially younger people who were born with a disability. These young people are often tacitly excluded from this dance culture (despite the occasional token appearance of disabled celebrity dancers) because its image is one of physical perfection and extreme, unrestricted movement.

With this exclusion in mind, some contemporary breakdancers have launched a number of projects that seek to include people with physical disabilities, particularly the visually impaired. Breakdancing can help with balance and teach safe falling techniques, both of which are helpful for people with visual impairments.

A participatory breakdancing project I took part in just before lockdown brought visually impaired people in South Yorkshire, UK together with a group of professional breakdancers.

Together they developed choreography, dance techniques and an accessible music technology keyboard. The aim of this project was to encourage visually impaired breakdancers to touch and hear dance moves to learn their art form.

Although the visually impaired young people who took part in the project had never tried breakdancing before, they adapted the techniques and skills to their needs and, over the course of a few weeks, showed greater physical confidence.

During the project, the amateur breakdancers adapted well to the technology. Audio description techniques developed to represent dance steps onomatopoeically allowed them to imagine and then communicate choreographies and design entire dance sequences. Onomatopoeic representations are sounds that represent the “shape” and “movement” of dance steps as precisely as possible.

The professional dancers were also really surprised at how well they were able to integrate their choreography and dance routines and appreciated the adapted music technology. Importantly, working with the technology and the newly adapted techniques helped the visually impaired participants develop a sense of social acceptance in the group.

Projects like this show that people with physical disabilities are capable of not only dancing themselves, but also physically and mentally choreographing dance steps. With this in mind, breakdancing culture should now do more to include marginalized groups such as people with disabilities, who have been excluded from the competitive element of this art form for far too long.

It is true that we still have a long way to go before we reach the number of people with physical disabilities who have developed the skills required to compete at an elite level, but it is only when breakdancing is introduced into the Paralympics that it can be considered a truly inclusive and elite sport.

The author is Associate Professor of Special Education, Disability and Inclusion at the University of Exeter in the UK.

Republished from The Conversation

Published in Dawn, ICON, August 18, 2024