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Transcription: [00:42:51]
I'd like to welcome every one of you to the workshop in Black vernacular dance from Philadelphia. We have with us the popping and breakdance crew known as the Scanner Boys. Probably Philadelphia's best popping and breakdance crew, if popular acclaim in Philadelphia and the winning of competitions is any indication at all.
[00:43:12]
What we'll be talking about today on the stage is the moves that go into popping and breakdancing. First, however, I'd like to give a very brief introduction into the nature of the dance.
[00:43:23]
A lot of people when they come to festivals of this nature will see - will know of breakdancing and wonder to themselves why is this folklore? What does this have to do with the folk festival? This is a dance which doesn't go back forty or fifty years, it's something which we see right here now. It's something which happened maybe two or three years ago.
[00:43:43]
Well in terms of the actual sequences of moves that you see in breakdancing, what you see on television, what you see in the movies, what you see on the street corner, it's true. Those moves, those sequences, as they are put together are perhaps only five, six, seven years old. In a form which developed, is popularly said to have been developed in the South Bronx of New York City.
[00:44:09]
However, when you look at vernacular dance, when you look at what people are doing, in the - who are in the dance community, you must realize that what we see the dancers doing is taking a set of movements, gestures, and body postures and putting them together in certain ways. But those movements, those sequences, those body postures, those are all part of a broader repertoire, a set of things which are traditional to a community.
[00:44:41]
So that a form of acrobatic dancing which may be popular in the 1980s and might be known as breakdancing. If you look closely at it, you might recognize moves that were popular in the 1920s or 1930s, when it was called perhaps flash dancing or in some areas called the acrobatic lindy hop.
[00:45:01]
The reason that you have these moves in the 1930s and you have them reappearing in the 1980s is very simple. That within a group, within a community, you have an entire set of body movements, a set of ways of holding and moving your body, a set of ways that you walk, a set of ways that you bend over, a set of ways that you move to music, which combined in a certain set limited number of ways, this can be called the movement repertoire.
[00:45:33]
And out of this, there are a number of ways which move - of moving - which come to the fore at certain times. Here at the festival, we have with us a fellow named Willy Ashcan Jones. Some of you may have seen him on the main stage appearing as a comic, but Willy Jones back in the late 1920s was a lindy hopper in Harlem in New York City.
[00:45:55]
He was an acrobatic lindy hopper. Now the acrobatic lindy hoppers of Savoy Ballroom used to do things like spins on their back. They would take - it was a couple dance - they would take their partners and throw them under their knees, over their heads. They would switch them from partner to partner, not by moving their partner on the floor, but by throwing their partner up in the air.
[00:46:17]
This sort of acrobatic dancing was popular for a while, for about a fifteen to twenty year period, starting in New York and spreading over the nation. It was a street dance and a vernacular dance, that by the late 1940s and through the 1950s had pretty much gone out of style. People still did the lindy hop but they didn't do the acrobatics.
[00:46:38]
Well, when Willy Jones came to this festival and saw the Scanner Boys performing out on stage, he scratched his head and said, "I was doing that same thing when I was their age in New York City." And the fact is, that he was.
[00:46:55]
And he didn't teach it to these guys, and he didn't teach it to someone else who in turn taught it to these fellas. Rather what happened was, the form that he was doing evolved out of this repertoire of moves in the Black community for a period of 20, 30 years it lay dormant.
[00:47:16]
Those moves were not put together in the same ways to feature the same sort of acrobatics. But in the late 70s and the early 80s, they once again began to come to the fore, and you have the development of what we now know as breakdancing.
[00:47:32]
In this workshop, what we're going to do is not as much the acrobatic breakdancing because this stage won't hold up to a lot of the spins.
[00:47:41]
What we're going to do instead is focus on popping, the dance form which was immediately, which was popular immediately prior to the advent of breakdancing, and which was incorporated into the repertoire of breakdancers.
[00:47:56]
What I'll do at this point, is introduce to you the leader of the Scanner Boys, the manager and the organizers of the group, and he will, as he introduces different--