BBoying

(Friday, 20 February 2009)

I’ve spent the last two days in Antigua moderating a workshop with 5 of the best Guatemalan BBoys (i.e., break-dancers, for the laymen as myself) and Es., also a volunteer at UPAVIM.

She wrote her master’s thesis on the positive effect that break-dance, and hip-hop in general, can have in marginalised areas. It’s a way of self-expression that helps build self-confidence, and creates something to belong to, that not a gang.

I guess it can have a lot of the benefits I argue for theatre: letting your emotions go, share them with other people and become comfortable with that; be someone else for half an hour; exorcise your demons while creating something you and others can be proud of. With the difference that the idea of break-dancing might be a little more attractive to the teens at risk in Guatemala City than the prospect of playing the role of a donkey in Midsummer’s Night Dream…

Interestingly enough, it looks like once making the bridge with break-dancing (ok, I’ll start calling it BBoying from this point onwards), often kids once at risk or involved in gangs seek other forms of artistic expression – music, painting… theatre.

So there may be a point to this all argument after all.

These 5 BBoys are in their late teens or early 20s. They belong to different BBoying crews, and so are adversaries in competitions. But I noticed a very genuine bound between them – of friendship and of a sense of belonging to the artistic form they chose (or that chose them?).

All of them divide their time between their families, work (and, for some, school) and BBoying. They practice, they compete, they teach other youngsters. They spend time during their weekends in “Escuelas Abiertas” (a more or less recent government programme that makes schools available over weekends for recreational and artistic activities), or in post offices (also open in a similar format to “Escuelas Abiertas”). There, they introduce other kids to the art of BBoying, they coach and practice with them. Above all, I guess they act as role models.

Here in Antigua we spoke about what they want to do and for whom they want to work for - they're aiming at setting up a cultural association of Hip-Hop for the Guatemalan youth. We spoke of what problems they want to help solve and how do they plan to accomplish that. We spoke of a vision and a mission. Of how they should organise themselves. Of how to grow steadily, step by step, form a small start to the more ambitious end-state they are so enthusiastic about.

One of the things they kept saying to me was that they’d like to build something their families, their friends, and society in general (including “los licenciados” and “los burgos”) could be proud of.

I think they should be already.