Breakin’ Down the Bloc

Abstract

Very few people would have predicted that a former Soviet Republic, Armenia, would be the site of a burgeoning Hip Hop dance scene. Yet today, you can find a weekly class that teaches breaking, popping, or locking throughout the capital, Yerevan, as well as in outlying areas such as Abovyan and Charentsavan. Competitions take place regularly with guests who are visiting from throughout the former Soviet Union, Europe, and North America, and some dancers who make a living off teaching and performing Hip Hop dance styles. This chapter takes an in-depth look at the development of breaking within the country. Through qualitative interviews with practitioners and direct participant observation, it traces how—and more importantly, why—an artform from a region as far removed as the Bronx, New York, has been adopted by young people in Armenia. It argues that Hip Hop’s embodied practices have helped b-girls and b-boys challenge constrictions and forge new identities at a time of immense socioeconomic transformation, lending support to what dance scholar Halifu Osumare (2007) has identified as the “connective marginalities” developed through global Hip Hop culture.

Global Hiphopography

“…This type of "fifth element" work which avoids essentializing Hip Hop as predominately music-based and instead focuses on Hip Hop's central theme, what KRS-One had called "a shared idea, a feeling, an awareness" (v.52), is brilliantly substantiated in the writings of Maïko Le Lay, Friederike Frost, and Mylo Elliott. Breaking has received its own scholastic development with Fogarty and Johnson (2022) and Aprahamian (2023), with graffiti not far behind (Bloch 2019). But these three chapters paint a more polysemous understanding of what Le Lay calls "living praxis" (2023: 201).…”