Tiny OyoUnity @ ZK/U | John Lee – Breaking Poetics and Aesthetics

"Breaking Poetics and Aesthetics" is a hybrid workshop where participants are invited to dance and write about the movement of themselves and each other. By focusing on the foundation moves and sharing writings anonymously with each other, the workshop seeks to designate the essence of the art form as an intersubjective phenomena. At the end of the workshop, participants will have actively contributed to the embodied theorization of breaking with the ideas and feelings set in motion by the physical movement as well as the words to describe or instruct them.

Breaking aka b-boying and b-girling is an urban dance form originated from the Bronx, New York in the 1970s. Though its legacy runs half a century, its popular representation does not reflect the richness of the knowledge and spirit within the art form. Breaking, to quote Joseph Schloss, “is a profoundly spiritual discipline, as much as a martial art as a dance, as much a vehicle for self-realization as a series of movements.” One of the reasons that “the internal discourse of b-boying has been overlooked is that most academic hip-hop scholarship still operates within the framework of literary analysis and cultural studies. (Foundation, 2009)