Beefing B-boys
Late on a Saturday at the Lucky Brewgrille, Leo Gayden stands across the dance floor from his rival, planning his attack.
Leo has been breakdancing — or B-boying, to the insiders — for six years. But he can’t seem to prove his credibility to Kansas City’s established B-boy crews. The crews dominate hip-hop gatherings and B-boy battles. They roll their eyes when outsiders like Leo take the floor, and they shut them out of B-boy practices. A day earlier, a writer under the moniker 50Calibur bad-mouthed Leo on a B-boy Internet forum — the place dancers air their beefs, writing, You the ONLY black dude in this town that ain’t got rhythm!
Leo knows the author. Adonus Ray is across the room, laughing loudly with another dancer, the way mean schoolgirls snicker when they want to make a classmate feel left out. Adonus can’t be missed in his bright-red Converse, dark jeans and a puffy red vest.
I wanna cut him off while he’s dancing, Leo says in a low voice. That’s what I’m waiting on.
The Earth, Wind and Fire song Flashlight blares as Adonus takes the floor. He circles his territory with a bouncy uprock, the cocky, floor-skipping part of the dance before the B-boy hits the floor. The others admire Adonus for his rhythm and his style. Though he’s lanky, Adonus can jump up from a crouch so fast, it makes onlookers’ knees ache.
Just as Adonus really gets in a groove, Leo tears into the middle of the floor. Interrupting Adonus is equivalent to a graffiti writer crossing out another artist’s work. It’s the ultimate disrespect.
This is the moment Leo has been waiting for. Rejected by the established B-boy crews, 26-year-old Leo practices with the outcasts. He looks shabbier than the other B-boys, in torn jeans, a black tank top, a black hat and a black wristband. He’s extra cut, thanks to a job lifting heavy boxes by day at FedEx, and his muscles are tense under his clothes.
Adonus throws a finger in Leo’s face. Leo grabs Adonus’ arm like a monkey and ducks over it, under it, drops to the floor and springs back up. As Leo mounts his challenge, a fire is suddenly lit under Adonus’ crew. No one takes their eyes off the green-and-red-checkered linoleum. Adonus is over 6 feet tall and built like a basketball player, but he dances with quick footwork, his long limbs perfectly in control. More importantly, he dances with personality, the emotion of the music etched on his face, the beat reverberating through his midlength dreadlocks as he moves.
Adonus cocks an imaginary shotgun in his hands and blows Leo’s head off. In time with the music, he mimes digging Leo’s grave and scraping Leo’s head across his shoe. Leo and Adonus are both charismatic, crowd-pleasing dancers. But Leo lacks something that Adonus has: patience. His dances are rushed and frantic. Adonus’ are clean, making his message clear: I dominate you.
Leo strides off the floor, winded and sweating. Had it been a real battle, in front of a judge, he knows Adonus would have won. But winning wasn’t Leo’s goal. He wants respect. “I came out here to make a statement, that I’m not playin’,” Leo says, once he’s caught his breath.
Later in the night, Adonus approaches Leo, holding out his hand to bang fists. “It’s all good, it’s some B-boy ish,” Adonus nods, appreciatively. For standing up and facing Adonus, Leo earned some props.
Breakdancing in Kansas City attracts crowds of onlookers at downtown bars, First Friday art shows and DJ exhibitions. It’s a mainstay at the Peanut on Ninth and Broadway on Sunday nights, when local heads crowd the neighborhood bar for their weekly fix of the showcase called Hip-Hop and Hot Wings. Lately, you’d have to be in a nursing home to avoid it. But few in the crowd understand how devoted B-boys are to their art or how heated their disagreements can be.
[page]
Recently, members of the KC B-boy scene took a field trip to St. Louis for a strictly Midwestern battle called Two Can Play That Game. While Adonus and his crew went to face the best B-boys from places like Chicago and Omaha, outcasts from the Kansas City scene went just to prove that they deserve to call themselves B-boys.
Every few months, and especially before a battle, the drama between B-boy cliques heats up. Some alliances are made while others are broken. The Internet forums get nasty. This is one of those times.
On the Tuesday before the St. Louis battle, Leo and the other outcasts practice in a ballroom dance studio in Overland Park. They’re not a crew. They don’t have a leader; if they did, it would be Marcus Shadden.
For some B-boys, including Adonus, the uniform is very specific. It demands clean white shoes, jeans with no holes, shirts with collars, cocked hats and hip-hop swagger. So with the jungle-scene tattoo that graces his arm, the ring that pierces his lip, and the studded belt that encircles his waist, Marcus’ look doesn’t scream “B-boy.” His critics might say it screams “boy band.” But no matter, he lets his dancing do the talking. Marcus is disciplined, polite and devoted to the art. The French owner of the dance studio, Louis Bar, is convinced that Marcus is the epitome of what a dancer should be, so much so that he gave Marcus keys to the studio and trusts him to lock up late at night after B-boy practice is done.
The dancers stretch their legs, forming a chain of V’s on the floor. A 22-year-old kid named Richard Turner, who calls himself Beat Street, is there, as is a young Jamaican guy named Kenrick Thompson. A 17-year-old newcomer named Daniel Cisneros, who gained the flexibility needed for breakdancing by studying the Brazilian fight-dance called capoeira, attempts a windmill in the corner, spinning slowly on his back.
“You gotta stretch a lot, man,” Marcus warns him.
The discussion turns to who’s coming tonight. Leo says that Sug, a funk dancer and breakdancing instructor who’s cool with nearly everyone, bridging the gap between crew and non-crew B-boys, might come.
“He can’t come to my practice if he’s not going to talk to me in public,” Marcus says. Marcus used to be in with a crew formerly called Buggin’ Out. Marcus even used to practice in a place every B-boy in Kansas City has heard of: the Dungeon, aka Fredo Montez’s basement.
Fredo lives with his mother in Kansas City, Kansas, works at Nebraska Furniture Mart and acts as the gatekeeper of the Kansas City B-boy scene. Though it’s not an official title, he tends to have the final say on where it’s cool to dance, which B-boys have skills, who’s in and who’s out.
Fredo’s older brother was among the kids who used to gather in front of the Don Bosco Community Center in the 1980s, trading moves on flattened cardboard boxes. Back then, B-boying was a burst of rebellion springing from the hands and feet of ghetto kids, first in the Bronx underground scene, then in Los Angeles. Soon every kid wanted shell-toed sneakers and a practice mat. But by the time McDonald’s incorporated breakdancing into a commercial, the dance was played out. Most link the resurgence of B-boying in Kansas City with the arrival of FlavorPak, a Xerox-copied, hand-stapled ‘zine first published around 1995 by artist and activist Jeremy McConnell. McConnell’s ‘zines featured graphics from local artists and updates on hip-hop events in the gritty galleries of the East Crossroads and the West Bottoms.
[page]
Fredo’s place is secure within the hierarchy, not because he’s the most talented dancer but because he has put in the most work to create a B-boy scene in town. Fredo is like a walking encyclopedia of hip-hop history. He helped form the now-disbanded Buggin’ Out crew and, with the remaining members, formed a crew called the Dynasty Warriors. He has organized and promoted his own battles and brought big-name B-boys to town as judges. He is the scene’s biggest proponent and loudest complainer. If Fredo thinks the B-boys aren’t getting enough respect from an MC, enough publicity on a hip-hop promoter’s flier or enough room on a dance floor, someone’s going to hear from him. To Fredo, B-boying is personal, which is why he’s often at the center of B-boy beef.
Marcus once practiced with Fredo and the crews. But Marcus says that Fredo spread rumors that Marcus was bad-mouthing other dancers, accusing them of biting moves from others. The hassle of always having to dispel drama with other B-boys annoyed Marcus. “Every time we saw each other out, there would always be this tension,” Marcus says. “I got tired of it. I’d rather just have beef than to keep having to act like everything’s OK.”
The drama came to a head over three years ago at the River Market nightclub Kabal, which used to host Wild Style Wednesdays, a night B-boys would attend religiously. A dancer from Lawrence got in the cipher — another name for the breakdance circle — and challenged Marcus by throwing air punches and defiant looks.
So Marcus walked into the cipher. He looked at each of the B-boys around him and ticked them off on his fingers, as if to say he could take them all. Somehow it escalated into an actual fight. One B-boy got his pants ripped from waist to cuff. Someone got pushed. Marcus punched a B-boy in the face, and he and Fredo were ejected. The B-boy code of keeping all hostility strictly expressed through dance — defined by former gangbangers in New York who created breakdancing back in the 1970s — had been broken. “It’s all this childish BS,” Marcus admits. “Maybe in 1970, when you said ‘let’s handle this on the floor,’ you could do it. But it’s not like that now.”
These days, Marcus keeps his social life and his B-boy life separate. Dancing is serious for him, but he tries to keep it less intense than how Fredo and the crews treat B-boying. “Serious, like this,” Marcus explains, motioning to the studio’s practice room, “is different than they are. They think they’re the godfathers of breakdance. I don’t know if it’s just the B-boys in Kansas or if they’re like that everywhere. I did want to be in their crew because they’re good dancers. But I’d rather represent people who may not be the best B-boys but who have good heads on their shoulders.”
Nearby, Beat Street practices moves that make Cirque du Soleil look like hopscotch. He lies flat, facedown on the hardwood floor, then pops into the air, still parallel with the ground, his body forming a gentle arc like the shaft of a feather. He lands noiselessly, only to twist himself in a new shape.
[page]
Beat Street is a 22-year-old from east Palo Alto, California. He says he had a full-ride track scholarship to Georgetown lined up before he got in some trouble. He came to Kansas City two years ago to straighten up. He has braces and a friendly, handsome face, and he’s never without his pageboy hat and T-Mobile Sidekick. His look is light-years away from “thug,” yet he says he had a dark side in California, as a member of the Crips. He claims that he ran everything from Cuban cigars to cars. Friends gave him his name because of the boombox he used to set up on the block after school.
After moving to Kansas City, Beat Street sought out the breakdancing scene. But he says the established B-boy crews wouldn’t let him attend their practices, so he found Leo and Marcus and danced with the outcasts. When he heard about the upcoming Midwest battle, Beat Street tried to contact a friend in St. Louis using the B-boy Internet forums, asking him to partner up for the two-on-two part of the competition. Fredo fired back an all-caps response that questioned Beat Street’s loyalty to the Kansas City scene by seeking an out-of-town partner. Fredo finished his post by claiming that he’d roast Beat Street in the St. Louis battle and force him to change his name.
Beat Street’s reply to Fredo threatened violence beyond the dance floor. And it got personal. “Grow up and move out of your momma’s house!” he wrote.
Beat Street ended up teaming up with Marcus for the two-on-two battle. Fredo and Adonis signed up as another team. Both teams will battle rivals from all over the Midwest and could end up facing each other.
Leo isn’t going. He already squared things with Adonus. Besides, he has plans the weekend of the battle to introduce his new girlfriend to his parents. “I have a possibility of spending my life with this girl,” he says. “I can miss a jam.”
At the dance studio, Leo plants his feet in front of the mirror and starts slowly, slowly bending backward at the waist, arms stirring up the air in front of his body in slow-mo, like Keanu Reeves dodging bullets in The Matrix. Only he doesn’t need special effects.
Marcus changes the music from funk to electrobreaks. One hand follows the contours of his body, animating the spot it touches wherever it travels. Then he starts strobing, dancing jerkily as though under a flickering light. Each jerk of his body matches the beat. He switches to shuffling like a berserk robot. Turns out Marcus knows popping and locking, the West Coast-born versions of street dancing, as well as East Coast breaking.
“All footwork,” Beat Street announces, and the crew of outcasts practices for 20 minutes more. It’s nearly 11 p.m. when the B-boys pack up to leave, trading tips on calming sore muscles and joints on the way out the door. Kenrick suggests Ben-Gay, his Jamaican accent making it sound like an exotic remedy.
In the parking lot of the dance studio, Beat Street and Marcus knock fists in anticipation of their two-on-two battle Saturday night. “This is it,” Beat Street says. “This is big. It ends here. It’s about respect. And all that frustration’s gonna come out on the floor.”
On the Saturday of the battle, carloads of B-boys caravan along Interstate 70 toward St. Louis. Their cars wind past the arch, through smoke-huffing industrial lots, and across the miles of busted streetlights and boarded windows of East St Louis. The Two Can Play That Game battle isn’t at some inner-city street corner, as one might expect, but at a bar called the Ground Floor in Belleville, Illinois, a quaint St. Louis suburb.
[page]
When Beat Street and Marcus pull the door open, steam pours out into the frigid night. B-boys and b-girls from Oklahoma, Omaha and Chicago stand shoulder-to-shoulder around two taped-off rings at floor level. One ring is for practice, the other is for the real deal. It’s a sea of Pumas and Adidas, neon athletic stripes, sweatbands and hoodies.
Adonus is already there, posted up in the back with Fredo. Adonus wears a Knicks jersey, black pants, blue socks and black tennis shoes. The Knicks logo is a nod to his hometown in New Jersey, the first of many places he lived with his military dad. It’s where he learned to breakdance over a decade ago. “When you dance, it should tell a story about yourself,” Adonus says. “When I dance, it’s who I am, where I come from, where I am and where I wanna go. If I’m angry, you can see it in my uprock. If I’m happy, you can see it. It’s not a diss to any people who want to dance, but it’s just the simple truth.”
Stretching nearby is Flops, a 22-year-old design grad from the Kansas City Art Institute. Flops, whose real name is Van Sneed, is a member of the Dirty Q-Tips crew. He adheres as passionately to the B-boy code of dancing, practicing and dressing as Adonus and Fredo. “I’m not gonna fake the funk to your face if I don’t think what you did was cool, if I’m not feelin’ your style,” Flops says. He’s decked out in a basketball jersey and white pants. His curly black hair is tucked under a hat. At his day job, at the Sharper Image on the Country Club Plaza, he played James Brown songs on repeat all week, mentally gearing up for the competition. “If you just kneel and get on your head and spin around for five minutes and crash out of it, that’s garbage.”
Marcus and Beat Street sit among a cluster of contestants and onlookers, anxious for the two-on-two showdown. The Seven to Smoke contest is first. Flops is signed up for the battle, which is a quick series of judged rounds among seven B-boys. Flops is one of only two Kansas City dancers signed up for the preliminary round. The other is Graham Oatman, a freshman at the Art Institute.
When the DJ drops MOP’s “Ante Up,” the crowd surges toward the competitors’ circle. Graham faces a kid from Chicago’s Chapped Lips crew. Graham’s dance is perfectly old-school. He starts by uprocking around the circle, then slips down to all fours. He walks on his hands like a Harlem Globetrotter minus the basketball, then drops down even further to a freeze, holding a pretzel pose. When he regains his feet, it’s in one swift scissors kick, moving weightlessly, as if through water.
But the first signs of a problem quickly appear: The Chicago dancer battling Graham not only is good at those clean, foundational moves but also has some acrobatics up his sleeve. He departs from a tight uprock, pulling both legs in the air and dropping squarely to the ground on his ass in a faux-wrestling move clearly meant for Graham’s face. The Chapped Lips dancer wins.
[page]
Flops faces a tall B-boy dressed all in black, with the pale cheekbones of a Russian assassin. The Curtis Mayfield song recently borrowed by Kanye West for “Touch the Sky” blasts from the turntables. The assassin is all power moves, and while Flops’ fancy footwork would be appreciated by the most old-school breakbeat junkie, he’s missing a unique fingerprint to match his opponent’s creative style. The judges point to the assassin as the winner, and Flops drops back to be consoled by Adonus.
The beating continues for Flops, who finishes the preliminary Seven to Smoke round in the back of the pack. Graham won an impressive handful of matchups as the new kid from KC, but not enough to take the contest. Things aren’t looking good for Kansas City. They might be hot shit at home, but they’re getting a serving of perspective.
When the Seven to Smoke ends, a disgruntled B-boy calls out one of the three judges to battle him. A judge named Check It dives into the crowd. The B-boys who feel unproven dance against each other as the audience pushes forward, crowding the ring. “These battles are always the best,” Check It says. “This is what B-boying is all about, not the competitions. It’s a battle for pride.”
But it quickly gets out of hand. Fredo steps in to pull two heated dancers apart. The music lurches to a halt. “Keep it going. That shit was hot!” Marcus urges the DJ.
Thomas Evans, one of the organizers of this jam, gets on the microphone, pleading for everyone to cool down and get ready for the two-on-twos. Fredo and Adonus are paired up. Marcus and Beat Street stand together. No one takes their eyes off the circle.
The Kansas City B-boys’ strategy is to keep it clean and correct for the first round and pull out the power moves like windmills and back flips during the finals. Meanwhile, the Chicago B-boys care less about keeping their footwork correct and traditional and care more about power moves that make a crowd gasp.
When the main event begins, judges call out a set of contestants to enter the circle. Each pair of dancers play “rock, paper, scissors” to figure out whose team goes first. Marcus and Beat Street hit the floor to a remix of Nas’ “Made You Look,” an aggressive anthem draped in an old-school breakbeat: This ain’t rappin’/This is street-hop/Now get up off your ass like your seat’s hot.
Beat Street rocks a white zip-up and a skull cap with a short brim, and he dances clean, with a bouncy toprock, scuttling from one end of the circle to the other. When he gets down for floor moves, he holds his lower half aloft, legs cutting the air in perfect form, feet sweeping the sky. After an opponent’s turn, Marcus drops from his feet to the floor neatly, executing a tight sequence of steps before stopping in a freeze balanced on one elbow. Then, he rolls his whole body on the floor in the worm to get back to his feet, popping up in the air like a kung fu fighter.
When Fredo and Adonus take the floor, someone in the crowd says, “Y’all entered it? No fair!” Adonus lets loose in the circle like a tiger pacing a cage, like Ali canvassing the ring. His footwork is flawless, but something’s off. He’s missing the relaxed, swaggering, easy Sunday style of his usual stride. He seems rushed. And he’s the stronger dancer of the two. Fredo takes his turn, clad in a cushy gray zippered jacket. For his turn, he busts some uprock steps, then pretends to klonk himself on the head, knocking himself to the floor for some moves. He isn’t the quickest, but personality goes a long way.
[page]
The level of dance-floor animosity is high; guys take faux swipes at each other’s faces, mime that they’re wiping their feet off on each other, and throw defiant stares. A duo slices the air with some tandem moves; one guy picks his partner up, frozen in a pose, and sets him loose again. It’s kind of fresh, but also part clown college. In synch, they dance, then frog-hop each other in the tiny space. Their opponents, in response, dance in mirror image of each other and freeze; then one guy uses his partner’s cart-wheeling leg as a machine gun aimed at the other pair, blowing them away. These petite guys dance like lit firecrackers, skittering perfectly to the beat.
In all, more than 20 pairs battle each other before the first round of the two-on-twos ends. It’s 10 p.m., and the room is raining sweat. Dancers grumble over the bar’s lack of Red Bull.
Judges Tyquan and Check It get on the microphone to announce the finalists. Time’s running out, they say, so they’re ditching the original plan of multiple rounds and a bracket system to decide the winner. Instead, they’ll pick their favorite eight pairs for the finals. This change of events doesn’t fare well for the Kansas City B-boys, who saved their power moves for the final dance.
“I didn’t know it was supposed to be a showcase!” Beat Street protests. “I would have done hella different sets!”
“Me, too,” Marcus says sadly.
Marcus and Beat Street, looking for their chance to challenge the establishment, don’t make it. But then, neither do Fredo and Adonus.
The only Kansas City B-boys to make the finals are two crew regulars, Josh Romero and Brandon Roberts, who goes by Bam Bam. When he’s not winning B-boy battles, Josh, 21, works in a Lawrence factory making boxes. Bam works at Pizza Shuttle. They’re both dressed in the same basketball-jersey style. Compared with tall and lanky B-boys such as Adonus and Flops, though, they look like they come from another B-boy planet. Their bodies are compact and petite, acrobatic and lightning-quick.
Bam and Josh go up against a pair of Chicago dancers named Waka and Evol. Waka has been talking shit all evening, nearly causing fights, and this is his chance to back up his talk. The battle is ridiculously hot, like four wizards casting spells at each other. Waka and Evol’s routine is clearly rehearsed, which is wack, according to Josh, who claims that he and Bam made up theirs on the spot. “They didn’t dance to the music, it had no feeling,” Josh complains later. “It’s like the difference between a bad actor and a good actor. They’re still technically actors, but they’re bad actors.”
All four are light on their feet and on beat, as if the speakers are patched into their bloodstreams. The judges choose Waka and Evol over Bam and Josh for the final battle. Waka taunts the losers, telling Bam and Josh that they’re not real B-boys. Fredo ends up in the near-fight that ensues.
Adonus and Flops settle for dancing during the downtime before the last battle. “I feel better after ciphering some,” Flops says. He concedes that the defeat means he needs to practice a bit more. “I need to go back to the lab.”
[page]
In the finals, Waka busts a spin that stops in a spread eagle on the floor. The crowd cheers after a second of stunned silence. At Evol’s turn, he does a handstand, then hops up and down on his hands, switching them from palms-down to backs-down, which looks painfully cool. The rhythm guitar in James Brown’s “Tighten Up” has everyone nodding their heads. Waka and Evol win and go home with $200 in prize money.
While most of the B-boys from the battle flood a nearby Belleville IHOP, Adonus and his crew leave to change clothes and crash in their room at a nearby Holiday Inn. There is talk of checking out a late-night East St. Louis club for more dancing, but no one’s in the mood. Marcus and Beat Street head to Denny’s for pancakes.
Had Fredo and Adonus battled Marcus and Beat Street, it would have been a good contest, Marcus says later, but he thinks his team would have won. “It depends who’s judging,” he says thoughtfully. “Our style is more new-school, and Adonus and Fredo are more trying to be old-school New York-style B-boys.” The battle went to a pair of new-schoolers, so Marcus thinks his chances would have been better with these judges. Too bad he never got to break out his best moves. “In the first round, you try to do as good as you can, but you save some stuff for later. We did just enough to beat the other opponents in the first round, so we’d be ready for the second. That’s not what happened, so that kind of sucked.”
Fredo, hungry from a night of tension and sweating, drives Bam’s car on a late-night White Castle run. In the car, he lists the reasons why the Kansas City dancers lost. Waka and Evol didn’t pull solos against Bam and Josh. The judging was wack. The venue was too small. Fredo’s tone isn’t bitter, but it’s certain and comforting. It’s obvious why it would be nice to be on his side.
Back at the Peanut, two Sundays later, Fredo makes a surprise appearance. He’s been battling a cold, but he still cuts up in the middle of the cipher. He has to sit down afterward, huffing; his girlfriend fetches him a cup of water. Leo’s dancing is refreshed after his short break, and Marcus is there, shifting his weight from leg to leg, paint-splattered after a day of work painting houses.
Beat Street is here, too, rocking an old T-shirt that bears his name in iron-on letters. He flips upside down in the circle, the pupil in an eye of dancers, his shirt creeping up to reveal a sweat-slicked topography of muscles. Other B-boys nod their heads. The kid’s been practicing.
Fredo approaches Beat Street and offers a hand. “It’s squashed,” he says of their former drama. “We’re cool. If you want to come practice anytime, give me a call. You’ve got potential.”
Beat Street leaves the Peanut grinning, confident. “There aren’t that many B-boys around here,” he says. “If we can all coincide and relax, come together and stick together, we’ll all do fine.”
