Breakin’ NYC brings hip-hop dance to a new audiences, old, young, and worldwide.

 

There are (at least) two kinds of tourists who come to visit our fair town: lovers and fighters. The fighters make their trip an uphill battle: they refuse to take public transit, they won’t eat pizza standing up, and they don’t like the background buzz they call “the noise”. 

 

The lovers must be peeled off the sidewalks when it’s time to leave — they zoom from the Statue of Liberty to a Yankee game in the same day, dream up backstories for bodega cats, and overpay for nutcrackers. They’re absolutely delighted to get on the subway to the sweet sounds of ‘SHOWTIME’. 

 

Recession indicator: I haven’t seen any breakdancing buskers on the Lexington Avenue line this summer. But fear not, lovers, if SHOWTIME won’t come to you, you can go to the show. 

 

Breakin’ NYC, an Off-Broadway dance production, will give you all the cool moves your heart desires from the comfort of an air-conditioned theater and you won’t have to worry about dirty sneakers nearly swiping the side of your face. 

 

Breakin’ aims to make hip-hop dance accessible and to set the record straight. In the general public, there’s a conflation between street dance, break dancing, popping and locking. Even within break dance there are specific techniques: top rock, foot work, power moves and freezes. To the non-dancing viewer, it’s all the same. We just see people on stage moving in ways we cannot begin to emulate. To the creators of Breakin’ NYC, these distinctions are emphasized as fundamental knowledge. And this goes back to the creation of the show.

 

Eric Krebs, the owner of Theater 555, wanted to produce a hip-hop show for his grandkids who had first seen breakdancing in the Paris Olympics. As we all learned from watching the Australian contestant in 2024, breakdancing can be done incorrectly if it’s not performed by the best, who can be expensive. Angel Kaba, the writer and director of Breakin’ NYC, worked with Krebs to widen his lens and produce a more manageable project, a show about the “evolution of hip-hop dancing and street dancing”.

 

The “well actually”-ness of it all is encoded in the show’s DNA. What you thought was breaking is actually popping, what you thought was pop locking is actually electric boogaloo, what you thought came from New York actually started in California and the combination of video and performance does feel a bit like a school assembly with visiting performers. The children in the audience shouted unsolicited questions toward the stage; even they seemed to pick up on the sense that parts of the show felt like school and audible curiosity was welcome. 

 

Breakin’ NYC makes an effort to include everyone in the hip-hop story which is, in some ways, admirable. The 11-person cast was homegrown and international with dancers from Brooklyn, the Bronx, Korea, Peru, and Romania. Sometimes, elements of the show bristled against the demand for mass appeal and approval. A Black dancer delivered a short monologue about how hip-hop dance is a way to express his heritage with all the panache of an animatronic robot at the ‘It’s A Small World’ ride in Disneyland. The performers were charismatic when they were dancing, but enigmatic while speaking, as if the dialogue didn’t come naturally to them. 

 

But it’s unlikely that anyone is coming to a show about breakdancing (well actually, a show about hip hop and street dance) to hear long stories about history and technique. They want rhythm, beats, and movement — which Breakin’ delivers. They can back spin, bachata, and get lite. I was bopping in my seat and reminiscing on the parts of the hip hop story that I was lucky enough to live through. (When they got to the early aughts, I had to try not to laugh at memories of krumping at my high school dances in Utah. They called me Krazy Arms and I really thought I was doing something!) 

 

If watching the 2004 film “You Got Served” makes you feel you missed your chance to get hype in the center of dance circle, you can get on stage and show off your moves in the dance battle finale. Don’t worry about getting laughed at or losing because everybody wins. Fair.

 

This isn’t a street corner, a sub-basement, or a subway train. Hip-hop was born in this city 50 years ago; it’s finally old enough for mainstream culture to take it seriously and put it on stage. The trade off for the change of venue is that the grittiness used to measure authenticity is polished off in the process. When Dena “Hittin’ It Hittin’ It Hittin’ It” Rizzo made her oft-meme’d instructional hip-hop dance video Street Style in 1999, the response was unkind. But that DVD, like this Off-Broadway production serve a similar purpose: access. And entertainment. It’s fun, it’s upbeat, it’s for everybody. Like they say on the A train when they come around with the hat, “A smile is free. Show ya love, not ya hate.”             

 

blacklove 🖤 and starlight 🌟 

 

Breakin’ NYC is written and directed by Angel Kaba and produced by Eric Krebs at Theater 555. There are 6 performances a week: Thursdays at 2pm, Fridays at 7:30pm, Saturdays at 3:00pm and 7:30pm, and Sunday at 2:00pm and 5:00pm. I received a press ticket to this performance. Ticket are available for $29, $59, and $89. 

 

Watch my video review of this show on TikTok.