Breaking, Ballet, and the Representation of Race and Gender
The exceptionally popular urban phenomenon of breakdancing made its presence strongly felt in a variety of representational spaces, from medical journals to television pilots and advertising. For instance, in 1984 The New York State Journal of Medicine featured an article entitled “Hazards of Break Dancing,” and the Journal of the American Medical Association ran a report called “Breaks and Other Bad News for Breakers” in 1985.1 These commentaries, among other articles, were generally concerned with the dance style’s inherent physical dangers, and describe case studies of specific injuries due to breakdancing—subdural hematomas and “Break-Dancing Neck.”2 The Archives of Ophthalmology even ran a piece entitled “Ocular Trauma From Break Dancing.”3 A brief editorial in Parade Magazine lingered over a report of “acute scrotal pain” and “testicular torsion,” which allegedly plagued two adolescents following a vigorous breakdancing session.4 In sum there were sixty-nine individual cases of injuries due to breakdancing reported between 1984 and 1987.5 While many articles relate the possible injuries and side effects of breakdancing, there is very little written about the negative effects of other kinds of youth dance in the early 1980s. One exception to this, though, is a published medical investigation into the perils associated with heavy metal “head banging.” The authors of “Head Bangers Whiplash” assert that
vigorous dance styles of the youth culture have been reported to result in painful injuries. The current trend in dancing includes “head banging,” which involves rhythmic repetitious movements and extreme flexion, extension, and rotation of the head and cervical spine. If the dancer has shoulder-length or longer hair, the head banging requires an extra whip of the hair to keep it flowing and rotating. Dance-related severe pain in the cervical area may result from head banging.6
Interestingly enough, this article about heavy metal fans also linked its conclusions to previous studies of breakdance injuries by noting that
breaking pains and arthralgias have been described among urban adolescents in relation to another type of dancing: break dancing. With that group, cervical spine injuries have even resulted in paraplegia and in muscle and ligament damage, as well as in vertebral fracture.7
Although heavy metal and “headbangers” were a very visible (and mainstream) youth culture contemporaneous with hip hop and breakdancing, there is surprisingly little documentation elsewhere of the “head bangers whiplash” condition cited in this report. The medical community, however, seemed to obsessively document any and every possible injury that could be connected with breaking. On the one hand, this speaks to a mainstream fascination with breakdance culture that was certainly evident in diverse representational outlets. On the other hand, there is a disproportionate amount of concern over the supposed dangers associated with this dance style, almost to the point of pathologizing it.8
More conventional representational spaces for breakdance culture included television, magazines, newspapers, public events, parties, and contests as performers from American urban centers popped, locked, and spun across the country and even across the globe. In 1984, Michael Holman hosted Graffiti Rock, an innovative television pilot that modeled itself on American Bandstand and other youth dance shows. The pilot aired on local New York station WPIX/Channel 11. It was oriented around hip hop culture, and featured rappers Run-D.M.C. and breakdance group, the New York City Breakers. Public venues also began to host large-scale breakdance events. For instance, 6,000 people gathered at Boston City Hall Plaza to watch a performance by the New York City Breakers in June 1984, while the Swatch watch company sponsored a breaking competition in August of the same year, which was taped for national broadcast.9 Several soft drink companies, including Mountain Dew and Pepsi, also featured breakdancers in their television commercials during this time.10 As early as 1983, the New York City Breakers entertained at a large corporate party for the brokerage firm Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner, & Smith.11 By 1984, American breaking crews toured Europe and Asia, performing at carnivals, high profile fundraisers, and even in a show for Queen Elizabeth II.12
The majority of breakdancing crews and solo performers who experienced brief commercial success in the 1980s, such as Beat Street’s Robert Taylor, the New York City Breakers, and the Rock Steady Crew, were predominantly young men, and the dance form itself is considered a masculine mode of expression. Women, however, also played an important, yet underexamined role in the cultural phenomenon of breakdance. It is all but forgotten that breakdance offered a lexicon for women (and girls) to challenge and confront potentially overbearing or threatening expressions of youthful masculinity. In fact, it is precisely the association of the form with male vigor, athleticism, and sublimated violence that allowed women to appropriate the dance in a critical manner. An examination of print material and films from the early 1980s will reveal the complex ways young women engaged with this particular performance style in order to express their own identity, and explore a variety of strategic dialogues that challenged the codes of masculinity in dance.
This chapter begins with a survey of instructional manuals devoted to breaking because they help contextualize the use of breakdance in mainstream cinema in relation to gendered spaces of performance. Further, this discussion will also draw on other sources of print media to explain diverse attitudes towards breakdance and gender outside of cinematic representations. A close examination of the plethora of printed material pertaining to this dance trend will show that breaking was significantly concerned with delineations of masculine and feminine behavior, and that it was often linked to both covert and overt displays of sexual power.
Finally, I address the brief overlap between ballet and breakdance in the early 1980s, an artistic conjunction also explored in Flashdance. This cultural intersection materialized as a thematic feature of hip hop on-screen, and also made an impact on the world of professional dance. As this nexus is traced through print, I argue that dance producers and promoters attempted to cull breakdance “from the street” and introduce it into the academy in order to “re-masculinize” public perceptions of the male ballet star. When the conventional spaces of dance culture endeavored to absorb breakdance, producers and promoters tried to alter the dance form in order to make it fit European expectations of performance. The resulting hybrid productions attempted to narrativize and structure breakdance while expunging its improvisational aspects, so that it would be acceptable for consumption by mainstream audiences.
This revisionist history of breakdance uses the methods of feminist historians to tease out important issues pertaining to gender that have previously remained buried in the archival record.13 Obscure and less well-known publications are cited, and with this work the opinions of women and young girls contemporary with early breakdance culture are illuminated. When turning to cinema, attention is focused on how female characters interact with breakdance culture on screen. When breakdancing made its debut in feature films women were rarely featured as breakdancers, although a handful of examples (including Flashdance, Breakin’, and Breakin’ 2) portray female dancers whose sexual power and performance skills are directly linked to their interactions with urban street dance. Moreover, their bodies become threshold spaces upon which black and Latino performance culture engages with mainstream academic dance practice. Early instances of hip hop on film may have failed to produce any female breakers that were substantial characters; however, many of these productions reveal gender to be a startlingly important category of analysis in relation to understanding the link between mainstream performance and dance that is associated with urban communities of color.
At least ten breakdance manuals were published between 1984 and 1985. These usually included extensive photographic examples of dance moves, a brief history of the evolution of breakdance, as well as information on appropriate dress and footwear, music choices, and cautionary advice regarding safety while breaking. Some manuals, such as Break Dancing: Step-By-Step Instructions (1984), provide a link between printed visual material and the first cycle of hip hop cinema.14 Many of the photographs of breaking used in the book are actually taken from Breakin’ and Beat Street. These cinematic images are woven into the visual representation provided by the crew of dancers photographed for the manual. Martha Cooper, who was a photographer on the set of Wild Style, is also listed as a consultant for the manual. She is just one of the surprising number of women that are cited as either dancers or consultants for this book. This parallels the manual’s imagery as well, which seems to resist a dominant male identity for the breakdancer.
Breakdance: Electric Boogie, Egyptian, Moonwalk … Do it, another early breakdance manual, is coauthored by a woman, Bonnie Nadell, and features Susan Jeremy as one of the book’s main dancers.15 We read in the introduction that Jeremy is an important figure in the current breaking scene, and she is featured in several of the manual’s explanatory photographs. Jeremy was also an extra in Beat Street, and the text of the book suggests that learning to breakdance was a strategic move for this performer who initially began her stage career as a comedian. Although Breakdance features women in several photos, and implies that Jeremy is a rising dance star, the book infers that gender does play a role in the type of breakdance one may perform. Indeed, Jeremy is only featured in the electric boogie section of the book, illustrating the proper execution of mime techniques used in this type of performance. Electric boogie is a set of dance moves originally distinct from breaking. It includes a combination of mime, locking, and the jerky elements of The Robot.16 Michael Holman writes of an early dance crew which is credited with inventing this dance that
instead of throwing their bodies in and out of control like locking, or in total hydraulic control like The Robot, they passed energy through their bodies popping and snapping elbows, wrists, necks, hips, and just about all the body joints along the way. Electric boogaloo was more like mime in the sense that it pantomimed a live wire of electrical current, but it still needed the control of The Robot to give it style.17
All of the more athletic breaking moves are demonstrated through photographs of male dancers, while images of Jeremy are used to explain the techniques of electric boogie (or electric boogaloo, as it was originally named). Interestingly, the manual Breakdancing: Mr Fresh and the Supreme Rockers Show You How to Do It! describes the clothing style for female breakers as “simple and sleek—no high fashion designer look for them, no long parkas, or knit suits. Just Levi’s and Lee jeans—tight—and black short jackets.”18 On the previous page however, the reader is informed that “breakers need loose clothing so they can move when they do their Floor Rock, Spins, and Windmills.”19 Female breakers are described as wearing form-fitting clothing rather than the loose fit required of the demanding dance form. Paradoxically, however, in its introductory pages the book acknowledges that women are full participants in the scene as it describes the work of Rosanne Hoare, a professional jazz dancer who took up breakdancing and came to lead her own female breaking crew.20 The differences ascribed to men’s and women’s clothing suggest that women do not need the freedom of movement required by men to participate in breakdancing. This is explained by the gendering of breakdance moves that generally relegated women to the confines of the less physically strenuous electric boogie. It is tempting to naturalize this gender division in terms of the sheer upper body strength needed to perform most of the floor work in breakdancing in comparison to the less physically challenging electric boogie. However, the differences between these two styles of dance might also represent another set of gendered categories. Holman writes that electric boogie imitates the movements of nature “like a lightning bolt or a rippling river, whereas breaking is more out of control and anti-nature or anti-gravitational like a flying saucer.”21 This seemingly new and innovative dance culture, at least in the manuals, adopts archaic gender distinctions that place women within the realm of the natural, and associate men with technology and anti-nature. Yet women do assume positions of control across the representational spaces of breakdance culture. From the authorship of breakdance-oriented books to powerful positions vis-à-vis men within the dance world, women were clearly important to this phenomenon even though it is generally assumed that breakdance was a male-centered mode of expression that often rigorously excluded female practitioners.
Richard Majors and Janet Mancini Billson, the authors of Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America, include breakdance in their list of activities that fall under the representational strategy of what they call “cool pose.” According to the authors, “cool pose” is a ritualized form of masculinity full of both negative and positive characteristics that uniquely shapes and defines a significant amount of African American male experience.22 They write that “cool pose” largely arises “out of the legacy of slavery.”23 Majors and Billson go on to argue that
because black males in the United States have been subjected to systemic discrimination and unusually harsh conditions, we suspect cool behaviors have emerged with more frequency and intensity among low income black males than in other groups.24
Majors and Billson’s description of “cool pose” is interesting because it links the strategies of 1980s hip hop culture with the coping mechanisms of black male Americans since the beginnings of slavery. African American men have historically needed to invent a kind of mask or behavioral tactic that negated the damaging psychic effects of slavery and post-slavery forms of racial discrimination. Likewise, hip hop culture attempts to overcome the material impoverishment of inner-city life (which can be hazardous both to one’s emotional and physical well-being), and also functions to bring “a dynamic vitality into the black male’s everyday encounters, transforming the mundane into the sublime and making the routine spectacular.”25 Majors and Billson are right to point out that personal style as a marker of identity has played a large role in the African American male psyche, and breakdance seems to have fulfilled this function very clearly, judging from the archival record. While Majors and Billson focus only on “cool pose” in terms of negative consequences for black women, I would like to explore the representation of breakdance in relation to gender and race in a more nuanced manner.
Women of color have also used the avenue of “cool pose” to parody or usurp male power and identity through the stylings of hip hop culture. Furthermore, the first wave of hip hop musical cinema has given us female characters who appropriate the spaces of black and Latino male power through artistic performance in the narrative of the film. This is in marked contrast to the slew of peripheral female characters who dominate “New Black Realism” of the later 1980s and early ’90s.26 In fact, many examples from this earlier cycle of films feature female characters who are not dependent upon men for their survival in the urban environment. In Wild Style, for instance, Rose heads a graffiti crew independent of Lee, her estranged boyfriend who is also a graffiti writer. She fulfills the traditional film musical dual role of love interest and performance partner for the male lead, yet she also transcends the conventions usually ascribed to this character. Rose organizes The Union, her own crew, and she also refuses to be objectified by male characters who decline to take her work seriously. This is exemplified during a scene in which her estranged love interest first discovers her at work with her own “writers.” Prior to this moment in the film, other young men have referred to Rose as her lover’s “female,” a derogatory term, describing her as nothing more than an owned piece of property. The scene opens with Raymond and a group of other young men approaching The Union who are busy working on a legal wall mural. Rose is filmed from behind as she issues forth creative leadership of the artists under her tutelage while they paint. She humiliates Raymond by ignoring his verbal efforts to gain her attention; Rose is obviously no longer his “female.” She controls the creative vision of her crew (we see her holding a sketched plan of the mural), and also manages the technical expertise of the artwork; we clearly hear her command “don’t get drips now” to the all-male team of writers. The film then cuts to an image of Raymond illegally tagging a wall with his nom de plume Zoro. An obvious contrast is made between legal collaborative artistic work (The Union) and a romantic vision of clandestine art practice that involves becoming an outlaw. At the end of the film, Rose also articulates a conceptually superior view of the art form that she and her would-be romantic and artistic partner share, and it is her input that allows Raymond to complete his final graffiti “masterpiece.”
When female characters come from outside of the impoverished urban community in films such as Beat Street and the Breakin’ series, they also assume a powerful role in shaping the artistic stylings of male performers. However, these women are often white and/or representative of high culture. It is worth pointing out that the black press did take notice of racial difference in the casting of the two female leads of Breakin’ and Beat Street. Abiola Sinclair, a writer for the New York Amsterdam News, compares the two films:
Beat Street has an added plus: the love interest is between two black youths. Although she was very charming and engaging and didn’t have a stuck-up bone in her body, the girl in Breakin’ was white. It seems black girls never get to see themselves cast in a complementary light on the silver screen.27
Sinclair is astutely aware of the fact that the early 1980s marked a particularly striking nadir in the representation of black actors in American film. By contrast, the hip hop musical featured African American actors and other performers of color at this crucial time, and it often presented positive roles for women of color such as Rose in Wild Style and Rae Dawn Chong’s character, Tracey, in Beat Street. Krush Groove also featured a realistic romantic relationship between musician Shelia E. and Russell Walker (Blair Underwood).
Many scholars have noted that the physically demanding aspects and competitive structure of breakdance prohibited women from participating. Describing hip hop dance in terms of a male centered ritual, dance scholar Katrina Hazzard-Donald writes that
hip hop dance is clearly masculine in style, with postures assertive in their own right as well as in relation to a female partner. In its early stages, hip hop rejected the partnering ritual between men and women; at a party or dance, hip hop dance was performed between men or by a lone man. … Even in its early stages hip hop dancing aggressively asserted male dominance.28
Hazzard-Donald uses an ethnographic approach to the subject, and the argument is largely derived from her personal experience of social dance situations. It is persuasive to hear Hazzard-Donald state that
at about 1973 or 1974 I attended a dance given by African American students at Cornell University. I took the initiative and asked a young man to dance; on refusing my invitation, he explained that he couldn’t dance with women, that the way he danced was unsuitable for dancing with women. He proceeded to give me a demonstration of how this was so, running through several dance steps that I had seen performed by Fred “Rerun” Berry and the Lockers. Correctly performed, the dance did not allow for female partnering; it was a purely male expression and rarely performed by females.29
What Hazzard-Donald describes is one particular person’s explanation of why breakdance was not conducive to partner dancing but this does not necessarily indicate that it habitually excluded women. Although much of hip hop dance and breakdancing does assert an aggressive male stance and posturing, there are many textual, cinematic, and photographic examples that complicate the notion that breakdancing insisted on a radical exclusion of women. In fact, it can be shown that female performers often found ways of reinventing these masculine spaces for their own creative uses. These appropriations frequently parodied and critiqued black masculinity, and often facilitated the empowerment of young girls and women. Women breakers, like their male counterparts, also danced non-partnered steps in group formations (when breaking is shown in ballet magazines, however, female breakers are usually paired with men).
The News Tribune (Woodbridge, N.J.) reported that an all-female breakdance crew, The Female Break Force, performed at an open competition in Woodbridge in February of 1984.30 Seventeen-year-old Candace Tims, a member of the group, states that “the guys would break against each other instead of fighting. We were rejected by the guys so we decided to do it on our own.”31 In 1984, the Christian Science Monitor printed an article entitled “When my Daughter Moonwalks.” It laments the loss of partner dancing in relation to breakdancing, yet recounts a mother’s pride as she watches her daughter breakdance with confidence at a social gathering.32 A successful breakdancing crew from Queens, the Dynamic Rockers, also had two female members. This group won a competition at the Ritz in New York City in September of 1983, in which the women in the group performed.33
In a 1984 article from the New York Daily News, Clarissa Lopez (aka Lady Rock), a South Bronx resident and member of the all-girl breakdance team the Lady Rockers, writes that she is a “very good breakdancer” who started breakdancing to overcome her shyness.34 Above the text is a photograph of her crew donning mock poses of aggressive black masculinity. The five young girls camp it up in the newsprint image, obviously aware of the significance of violating gender norms and taboos in relation to dance performance. Ironic and playful, three of the five girls cross their arms over their body while flashing a rather knowing and self-aware smile at the spectator. Clearly, they are conscious that their corporeal adoption of “cool pose” represents a powerful comment on the gendered aspects of breaking, but the playfulness of the image also bears out a serious side. If “cool pose” is literally the refusal of black men to submit to their status as second class citizens, prescribed to them by white-centered American society, these girls are asserting an aggressive identity in defiance of white authority over blacks and other persons of color, and against black and white patriarchal oppression. Interestingly, Majors and Billson find that the strategy of “cool pose” adopted by African American men functions negatively in the lives of black women because
cool behaviors may prevent couples from establishing strong, committed, and authentic relationships. The games and masks, the highly stylized expression of self that makes the cool male attractive, are the very same artifices that inhibit intimacy and genuine companionship.35
The authors also assert that some black women may use the strategies of “cool behaviors” to “counter the attitudes and actions of cool black males.”36 Rather than focusing on this practice by black women as a highly conscious strategy in which “cool pose” is adopted for ironic and critical purposes, Majors and Billson primarily attribute this behavior to simplistic dating rituals of “playing hard to get.”37 My reading of visual examples from the 1980s involving breakdance suggests otherwise. The New York Daily News photograph of the Lady Rockers is an excellent example. It is an ambivalent image of youthful femininity, as the girls seem both awkwardly and obviously posed, as well as confident and sardonic in their adoption of male posturing.
In 1984, Dance Magazine also published two images containing female breakers in an article entitled “Breaking Away 80’s Style.”38 The first features Rosanne Hoare, performing a locking kick over the body of a male dancer bent into a bridge position. Clearly dominating the male dancer, she provides the energy and momentum in this image, while her partner appears static. Hoare’s dominance is further reinforced by the text of the article, which states that she is a professionally trained jazz dancer who is manager and choreographer of the Brooklyn breakdance crew The Furious Rockers,39 and also a house choreographer at the legendary Roxy venue, which the New York Times pronounced “a hot and crowded pantheon of hip hop music and dance” in October of 1983.40 Another full-page image in this article features a male/female pairing which shows one of the few breakdance partner moves, the two-man spin. However, in this rendition the woman lifts the man into the air to propel him in a circular motion. Violating all norms of the jazz and ballet lift, where the man elevates the woman into the air, breakdance pictorial representation seems to allow for a forbidden, inverted articulation of gendered movement and space.
At roughly the same time, Ballet News ran a feature article that seemed troubled by the gendered aspects of breakdance. The text frames the dance form as a wholly masculine performance ceremony that offers young men “praise and admiration from the girls” for achievements in breakdancing.41 In other words, breakdance is described primarily as a mating ritual whereby young men show off their skill and strength in order to interest potential female romantic partners. In describing a dance performance following a girls volleyball tournament at Jamaica High School in Queens, however, the writer notes that “a young lady leaps up, clumsily mimics electric boogie, then engages in a mock-serious dance dialogue” with one of the male dancers.42 This quote suggests an uncertainty about the limits of breakdancing in terms of a gendered mode of expression and communication. The young lady’s “clumsy mimic” may be a result of lack of skill, but the passage also suggests a knowing and challenging relationship to the masculinity on display—a reorienting of the typical function of uprock.
Uprock describes the combative and confrontational aspects of breaking, which are derived from the movements, gestures, and style of martial arts.43 However, uprock often involved a mimed non-violent insult, such as implying that the challenging crew or dancer smells bad. It could also take the form of parodying a particular move performed by a dancer that was perceived as weak or unoriginal by a competitor. If the female dancer described in the article is ineptly and awkwardly mimicking the moves of the previous breaker, it seems to me that it is likely that she is using uprock to challenge and parody her would-be male suitor. She may be unable to perform as well as her male counterpart, yet it seems more likely that her reaction is in fact a mocking of the intense display of masculine bravado often found in breakdance. Like the image of the Lady Rockers who lampoon the overt displays of masculinity at the heart of breaking through their own unique version of “cool pose,” this article from Ballet News also implies that women can indeed critique the aggressive and bombastic assertions of masculinity in hip hop culture through the lexicon of breakdance.
Both of these examples suggest a very strong case for the ambivalence of performance in relation to textual and visual accounts of the female breaker, and women’s relationship more generally to breakdance. In fact, breaking offered a much more fluid and flexible idiom of expression than the rigidly gender-defined practice described by Hazzard-Donald. Because the dance form was associated with such overdetermined gender roles, this is what made it available to women as a space of critique, and a place where one could challenge the strictly defined codes of masculine and feminine behavior associated with hip hop culture in general. Moreover, women dancers contributed to the development of the dance style even before it became co-opted by the media storm of the ’80s. Holman notes that
Toni Basil, who was famous for shows like “Shindig” and “Hullaballoo,” discovered Don Campbell and his Lockers and helped bring them to international fame. She was an incredible dancer herself and soon learned to lock. She became a member of The Lockers, helped develop their dance act, and got them on TV shows like Saturday Night Live and commercials such as Schlitz Malt Liquor Beer (the one with the bull). I remember seeing her and Don Campbell dance live at a nightclub called Crenshaw Flats in Los Angeles. I was blown away. She was actually better than he was!44
While Toni Basil, a talented choreographer and singer who went on to receive nominations for both Emmy and Grammy Awards, is rarely mentioned in the context of the development of breakdance, Adolfo “Shabba Doo” Quinones of the Lockers is often cited as an important early influence along with James Brown and Michael Jackson.45 Women not only choreographed breakdance groups but also taught breakdancing and were pupils of this newly emerging art form. Kimberly McKeever-Kaye provided breakdance lessons at the McKeever Dance Centre, which was located in the predominantly white, affluent bedroom community of New York City, Greenwich, Connecticut.46 Newsweek also claims that young white suburban girls were learning to break in “Dewitt, Mich. (population 3,596)” even before the slew of breakdancing films was released in 1984.47 The authors note that “Russell Brown teaches the moves to a class of 11-and 12-year-olds. His pupils break the demographic rules—they are all white and mostly girls.”48 Of course, young white suburban teens and housewives learning to breakdance in group classes largely decontextualizes the art form and renders the explosive political power of the female breaker moot. These accounts are generally celebratory and cursory, and they remove breaking from its initial context of inner-city America. The appeal of breakdance in this set of circumstances can more easily be explained by the popularity of group exercise/dance classes in the 1980s rather than a critical appropriation of representations of masculinity.49
Gwendolyn Pough discusses the use of “sass” as a rhetorical strategy to triumph over demeaning or degrading situations that devalue black female identity.50 She notes that scholars have traced this performance strategy back to early slave narratives written by women, while she uses the concept to explain the work and image of female rap artists. “Sass” involves the physical projection of a self-conscious sense of worth in the face of forces that threaten to erase or elide black female subjectivity. It denotes a highly self-aware display of embodiment, an act that is wedded to intellectual assertiveness. Of course, as many black feminist scholars have argued, African American women are often doubly marginalized as both women and people of color, and by both white society in general, and black men in their own communities. Because an inordinate amount of negative appraisals and stereotypes already plague black men, communities of color expect black women to remain tacit on the misogynistic and sexist elements of African American culture. Kimberlé Crenshaw writes that
although patriarchy clearly operates within the black community, presenting yet another source of domination to which black women are vulnerable, the racial context in which black women find themselves makes the creation of a political consciousness that is oppositional to black men difficult.51
Pough also notes that African American women have habitually been dis-empowered and marginalized in recent political and social black power engagements such as the Black Panthers and the Black Arts Movement of the same era.52 “Sass,” therefore, is unlike “cool pose” because it must attend to two distinct but related avenues of political and social marginalization, both within and outside of one’s own race. Several examples discussed above could usefully be understood as examples of “sass” because they cannot be separated from their connection to communities of color. The “sassy” strategies used by these women to assert their own worth and identity in the context of hip hop culture have been complex (even if they have not been read that way by scholars) from the very beginning because they have had to take on this “double burden” of negotiating the sexism of their own communities as well as the racism and sexism of North American culture in general. It is not surprising that male critics and journalists of hip hop have often failed to see the complexity and subtleties of women’s roles in, and contributions to, the hip hop community, especially when their strategies involve a confrontation of the hyper-masculine aspects of the culture.53
The relationship between women and breakdancing was an important point of signification in early mainstream hip hop musicals. Cinematic representations of breakdancing by women tended to utilize female actors who were either white or racially ambiguous. As we have seen, in Breakin’ a white female jazz dancer who learns to breakdance resolves the conflicting spaces of the film narrative—the street and the dance academy. Flashdance, the smash hit of 1983, while foregoing the actual inclusion of a female breaker, relies on the gendered codes of breakdance to describe and explain the sexual transformation of heroine Alex (Jennifer Beals) and her eventual movement from the street and working-class bar into the Pittsburgh Conservatory of Dance. The film locates the star in a predominantly white working-class social milieu. Beals, however, is actually of biracial heritage, with an African American father and white mother. In both cases, female dancers are able to meld breakdance with institutional dance. Their bodily gestures transform the spaces of high culture by bringing “street dance” to the academy. With these actions, the supposed boundaries between both dance forms, which of course point to larger social issues such as the unequal distribution of wealth between racial groups, are made irrelevant by exhilarating displays of dance virtuosity during the film’s final show sequences.
Flashdance repeats a very familiar trope of the backstage musical genre. A kid from the wrong side of the tracks wants to break into “legitimate” theater/dance/showbiz. She lacks proper training but makes up for it in perseverance and tenacity while charming her way into the arms of the “perfect man.” The trajectory and culmination of a successful romance parallels the performer’s ascent to stardom or some other career achievement.54 Alex, the female lead of Flashdance, works hard, toiling as a welder by day and dreaming of a place in a prestigious dance conservatory while performing erotic dances or flashdances in Mawby’s, a seedy working-class bar, at night. The narrative also follows the path taken by her good friend and fellow Mawby’s employee Jeannie Szabo (Sunny Johnson II), a waitress who dreams of transcending her blue-collar roots through the world of professional figure skating. Various other female flashdancers appear in the film, but none of the women except for Alex actually succeeds in fulfilling her dreams. Only Alex moves beyond her initial position as a flashdancer, or glorified stripper, through a successful audition for an upper-class dance conservatory.
Fig. 4.1. Alex (Jennifer Beals) flashdancing at Mawby’s in Flashdance (1983). Courtesy of Photofest.
In fact, Jeannie becomes a “bad” example when she fails to succeed during her big break on the skating rink. She falls during her routine and is carried off the ice as Laura Branigan’s song “Gloria” continues to pulsate over the speakers, and Alex looks on in sympathy for her friend. Following this failure, Jeannie ends up dancing at a nude strip bar (this type of “bad” dancing is contrasted in the film to Alex’s theatrical and artistic flashdancing at Mawby’s, in which clothes are not entirely removed) while Alex performs triumphantly at her dance audition and finds romance as well. A rather harsh lesson is observed: if you blow your big break you could wind up a has-been dancing the “cooch” on a beer soaked stage.
The structure of the film is episodic and it maintains a choppy or abrupt rhythm as the narrative is repeatedly fractured by extended flashdance sequences at Mawby’s bar. Rapid editing matches the upbeat and fast paced rock and pop tunes of the soundtrack. This has led many observers to note that Flashdance was nothing but one long calculated music video devised to cash in on this new market by specifically catering to a teen audience (the projected audience for television music video programming), despite the restricted rating that it received.55 Serge Denisoff and George Plasketes have argued that, although industry lore suggests otherwise, the creators of Flashdance never intended for the film to be marketed through MTV. They note that while Paramount credited MTV with the enormous success of Flashdance, at no time was the film conceived of in terms of music video segments. It was actually constructed in a modular fashion so as to make different sequences mobile within the film during editing.56 Regardless of the timeline of events related to the music video releases from Flashdance, it is certain that reviewers and critics at this moment were keenly aware of the potential relationship between the rotation of music videos on television and the aesthetic choices of filmmakers. In fact, Vincent Canby writes of Body Rock that it “looks not like a theatrical film but like a series of music videos that have been spliced together to make a feature length presentation.”57
Although many reviewers and academics mention that a group of breakdancers, the Rock Steady Crew, momentarily perform in Flashdance, little critical attention has been given to their appearance in this film. The dance segment has primarily been viewed as a watershed moment for hip hop culture because large segments of the theater-going public were exposed to the energy and creativity of breakdancing for the first time. Peter Rosenwald suggested that the film made breakdancing “accessible to millions,” while Catherine Foster, writing for the Christian Science Monitor, noted that “Flashdance catapulted this street art into a worldwide phenomenon.”58 An article from the Washington Post erroneously stated that “breakdancing first secured major national notice when, in the hit movie Flashdance, the heroine performed a spectacular breakdance routine to successfully audition for ballet school.”59 In fact, the heroine embarks upon a fairly standard jazz dance routine, although she does indeed incorporate a move stolen from breakdance—the backspin—during the final moments of her performance. While Rock Steady’s appearance in the film was the first large-scale cinematic exposure of breakdancing to mainstream audiences, Nelson George notes that another facet of hip hop culture, rap, was demonstrating its crossover appeal through its ability to place on the popular music charts as early as 1983. Rap artists did not, however, see regular rotation on MTV until at least two years later.60 One of the primary reasons for including a breakdance segment in Flashdance may have been just an attempt to appeal to youth audiences, but I argue here that upon closer examination of this film the Rock Steady Crew, and street dance in general, fulfill a specific narrative function, one that far exceeds a calculated anticipation of hip hop’s dramatic ascent in mainstream media and cultural activities just one year later.61
The Rock Steady Crew were a racially and ethnically mixed breakdance group, and this is not surprising given the fact that both African American and Latino dancers (in particular Puerto Rican youth) were responsible for the major innovations of its formal and stylistic properties.62 In addition, there were some white dancers in the crew, such as Mr. Freeze, who helped transform and refine the art form. Even through breakdancing can claim multiple racial origins, in Flashdance its presentation is closely affiliated with African American identity. Firstly, the film is set in Pittsburgh, and the town’s steel industry is evoked in order to construct a poignant rendering of working class life. If breakdance signified racial “Otherness” for the general public, in Flashdance it can most effectively be read in relation to African American urban identity since it was black Americans, rather than Latino immigrants who played a significant role in shaping the city’s steel industry. Secondly, although the Rock Steady Crew are a pan-racial group as I note above, when they dance in the street in the film, we see an almost exclusively black audience, further linking this performance to an African American communal context.63 This is all the more striking given the relative scarcity of black characters elsewhere in this film.
The urban terrain of Flashdance, made up of the gritty steel mills and working-class bars of Pittsburgh, was historically a space of racial contestation shaped by the struggle for industrial employment between Polish immigrants and Southern blacks. In their article “Migration, Kinship, and Urban Adjustment: Blacks and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900–30,” John Bodnar, Michael Weber, and Roger Simon argue that the circumstances of black migration to Pittsburgh were marked by a particular kind of racism that valued Polish immigrants as steel workers over black Americans arriving from the South during the first two decades of the twentieth century.64 They also note, “By 1910 blacks remained scattered throughout the occupational spectrum and had still not permeated the steel industry.”65 Bodnar, Weber, and Simon’s analysis rejects the theory of “ethnic succession” as the primary reason for lower rates of black industrial employment in Pittsburgh. They argue that very specific forms of racist and therefore exclusionary social structures in the city’s workplace prevented blacks from entering this industry, thereby impeding the establishment of the type of work kinship networks that were available to Poles and other ethnic groups at this time. The development of the U.S. steel industry is bound up with a history of racial conflict well into the twentieth century. Blacks could be used as scab labor by large steel companies because they were habitually denied membership in several major unions. Even after African Americans were admitted into trade unions, their needs have been continually overlooked by these organizations.66 The steel companies strategically used the racism prevalent in the industry to divide the labor force, and prevent workers from organizing.67 As late as the 1960s and ’70s, African Americans were still fighting against banishment to the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs, and a reluctance on the part of the industry to train black workers for more highly skilled positions.68
If the social spaces of Flashdance are predominantly white working-class locales linked to the steel industry, this specific history of racial conflict emerges as a central issue of the film.69 Following from this point, I argue that the continual negation and sublimation of racial identity within the cinematic text of Flashdance is a predominant theme that structures the film but eventually comes to the surface in a multitude of ways. These issues are driven home by several overlooked aspects of the film: the conspicuous punctuation of the narrative by a stream of Polish jokes told by Ritchie on the stage of Mawby’s bar; the repressed biracial heritage of Jennifer Beals, achieved by locating her character in an all-white social context; the continual presentation of black-identified urban dance moves; and the employment of a Puerto Rican breaker as body double in the final performance routine.
Additionally, the only significant conversation between a white and black character in the film serves to emphatically underscore the perceived difference between racially distinct modes of social behavior. A workout sequence set to Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll” provides the acoustic backdrop to this series of shots that divides the bodies of Maw-by’s working girls into fragmented glistening limbs and other corporeal parts as they lift weights. Alex and Tina Tech, another white dancer, discuss whether or not a potential love interest of Tina’s is “going to call.” Heels (Durga McBroom), the one black character in the scene, becomes so infuriated with her white friends’ passive “wait and see” attitude that she finally unleashes an abrupt and acrimonious racialized admonishment in which she suggests, “Look, just call the man … just say hey baby, what’s happening … the way you’re going on with this thing, your whole fuckin’ life’s gonna be over before you make up your mind. Just get up and call the dude.” Tina replies with a timid, “Yeah, you really think so?” Heels then blasts her with, “God, I’m glad I ain’t no honky.”
Although most critical appraisals of this film argue that it is only concerned with heteronormativity and the policing of gender boundaries, a closer look at the narrative structure reveals another predominant concern just below the surface. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have described the classical-era musical genre as a corpus that habitually mitigates “awareness of America’s multicultural formation.” Yet they also note that upon close examination these films reveal the presence of “submerged ethnicities” within the margins of the cinematic frame.70 Shohat and Stam go on to argue that
highlighting the exclusionary nature of the musical’s communality illuminates the dialectics of presence/absence of marginalized communities even in exclusively white-cast films which almost despite themselves reveal the suppressed others through music and dance.71
Although Flashdance is not entirely devoid of people of color, my analysis will reveal that the identity of Alex, the film’s star, is wholly predicated on a play between the revelation and suppression of a “submerged” black presence within the film. Here I also take a lead from Carol Clover, who argues that Singin’ in the Rain (1952), “America’s favorite object lesson on giving credit where credit is due,” is “driven by a nervousness … about stolen talent unrestored.”72 Clover makes reference to the choreography used by Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor in the film as examples of the “theft” and unacknowledged use of black talent by the entertainment industry. Dance is the representation and manifestation of this anxiety in Singin’ in the Rain, but Clover also refers to voice-doubling and other uncredited uses of black talent by white performers more generally. Thus, she argues that the film exhibits a repressed anxiety that can be observed on two levels. On the one hand, Singin’ in the Rain repeatedly interrupts the white narrative space of the film with Kelly and O’Connor’s routines, which appropriate black dance moves. On the other, the all-white narrative surface of the film is explicitly ruptured with specific references to black performance, for instance when Cosmo (O’Connor) suggests that the new “talkie” be named The Dueling Mammy.73
In a similar manner, while the Rock Steady Crew only appears once in Flashdance, the presence of black- and Latino-identified urban street dance interrupts the very fabric of the film, suggesting that its predominantly white social spaces are constructed in relation to a historical interchange—the appropriation of African American dance and musical performance by white actors—that must continually be repressed. Rock Steady’s number is far from being only a fleeting attempt to cash in on the rising popularity of breakdance. In fact, performance traditions primarily derived from communities of color significantly impinge upon the narrative development of the film, especially in relation to Flashdance’s characterization of feminine sexuality and dance ability.
Appearing only briefly in one sequence, members of the Rock Steady Crew are showcased in a musical interlude as Alex, with friend Jeannie, wind their way through the gritty streets of Pittsburgh. Upon leaving their all-girl workout session, the friends are initially confronted by a lone male breakdancer in the street performing the moonwalk, The Robot, and other mime-inspired gestures. Throughout this scene, we also see other members of the Rock Steady Crew dancing alone, or in pairs, accompanied by a “ghetto blaster” to the bottom left of the frame. The breakdancers occupy a central position in the spatial composition of the sequence, yet the scene is very short and the dancers never reappear in the film. Although Alex is the lead character in a film about dance, in this scene she merely participates as part of the breakdancing circle, cheering on the street dancers who wow the crowd with backspins and other slick moves. Throughout the performance, the camera is stationary but successive cuts suggest time ellipses as each edit brings more audience members into the frame, until the image is teeming with a sizable enthusiastic gathering of onlookers.
As noted earlier, the Rock Steady Crew’s presence in the film points to larger questions about race, performance, and gender in the postclassical musical, even though their routine is usually discussed in relation to the savvy marketing strategies that surrounded the launch of Flashdance. Shortly after the film’s release, young MTV fans were introduced to the star of Flashdance, and snippets of the thin narrative, through the relatively new music video format. Youth audiences were courted with extended dance numbers in a darkened club, sweaty workout sequences, and plenty of sexual energy in Irene Cara’s successful video to accompany her soundtrack contribution “What a Feeling.” The insertion of black-identified youth culture into a key music and dance sequence in the film might simply be counted as one more attempt to cash in on the youth market—in this case, with the growing awareness that young suburban kids were becoming increasingly interested in forms of urban African American music and dance.74 However, viewing black music and dance performance in Flashdance in relation to the entire history of race and performance in the American film musical, as well as in the context of the 1980s and the opening up of new youth-oriented marketing strategies, allows another picture to emerge.
This picture reveals how the conservative politics of race, gender, and class in Flashdance actually rely upon much older representational cinematic strategies to articulate a seemingly new set of relations. Flashdance is, at its heart, a fairy tale musical, whereby class differences are magically erased through romantic coupling. Alex, the working-class welder and aspiring dancer, ends up forming a relationship with a very wealthy factory owner, her boss Nick. All that Alex needs to lift her out of her blue-collar existence is to be rescued by an affluent, and much older, male suitor. For women who do not marry up, such as Jeannie, the picture is pretty bleak, and class divisions remain rigid. Class empowerment and mobility do not require any direct political or collective action in Flashdance, but rather are reduced to the personal and the sentimental. If we originally see Alex as part of a female working-class dance collective at Mawby’s, the final moments of the film make a point of emphasizing her individual achievements (in both love and career). Her female friends are left behind as we witness a solo dance performance, and finally, a portrait of Alex and her wealthy lover when Flashdance closes.
Furthermore, women are continually objectified and even literally reduced to the sum of their corporeal components in the film, as the editing repeatedly focuses on specific body parts during various dance and workout sequences. While this editing style was necessary in large part to hide the fact that Beals did not in fact perform the dancing herself, the 1980s have, in general, been recognized as a moment when a traditionalist backlash against feminism took root in American culture.75 The overt sexism of Flashdance is certainly symptomatic of a new conservative attitude towards women and their social and political empowerment. More generally, it also reflects a new concern in Hollywood cinema of the 1980s with success stories that separate the individual from his or her social context.76 It is made very clear in Flashdance that Alex must become detached from the concerns of her lower-middle-class community in order to achieve romantic and professional success. Unlike in the hip hop musical, which generally closes with the image of a unified community, Flashdance’s final moment, as noted, includes only Alex and her romantic partner in an embrace. Her ascent towards artistic, career, and romantic fulfillment must be at the cost of communal cohesion. In contrast, the hip hop musical allows for the star performer to achieve both personal and public success and stay attached to his or her local environment.
Fig. 4.2. Flashdance (1983) trades the community for the couple, Nick (Michael Nouri) and Alex (Jennifer Beals). Courtesy of Photofest.
Black-identified street dance in Flashdance largely articulates the relation between sexuality and success in the dance world for Alex. In fact, black communal street dance is linked to a delineation of her aggressive sexuality, one that facilitates Alex’s ability to snare a man and, as I later argue, perform her dance routines successfully. Thus, breakdancing, which is usually a collective ritual attached to local social and political action, is disconnected from communal empowerment. Instead, it is linked with the personal journey of one woman’s desire to transcend class barriers.
It also comes as no surprise that the Rock Steady Crew’s dance sequence directly follows the workout scene. The preceding weightlifting scene showcases the sculpted bodies of the female stars in order to emphasize their sexual attractiveness and availability. It could be understood as merely another instance of the female body on display for the male viewer. Yet the verbal exchange between Heels and Tina Tech insists that the viewer experience and understand black and white female sexuality in a dramatically different way whereby blackness is coded as aggressive and whiteness as passive. The film sets up a crudely oppositional relationship between black and white sexuality in the workout sequence in order to allow for the appropriation, merging, and transformation of raced-identified sexual characteristics in the film, which largely happens through dance.
A predominant perception of black dance throughout the twentieth century has been the assumption that it is rooted in a powerful, uncontrolled, and therefore dangerous expressive sexuality. It is no doubt the case, as many writers have suggested, that much of the “moral outrage” against the hip gyrations of Elvis Presley was explicitly concerned with the very “blackness” of his performance.77 Likewise, most of the admonitions put forth by both the black and white press against the “primitive” performance style of African American dancer and songstress Josephine Baker during the 1920s conflated her sexuality and race to the effect of marking her out as “a signifier of sexuality and desirability, and at the same time, because of her blackness, a signifier of danger and negativity.”78 Hollywood has endlessly utilized aspects of this racial trope, making it palatable for mainstream consumption by associating it with white screen stars. Marlene Dietrich’s “Hot Voodoo” performance in Blond Venus (1932) is exemplary. In this early sound film, the “femme fatale” emerges from a gorilla suit, Hollywood’s primary symbol of the “dark continent” and aberrant sexuality. These themes were even more explicitly pursued in the 1933 film King Kong.79 Robert Stam and Ella Shohat note that this representational strategy, which links racial “Otherness” with the animalistic and overtly sexual, has also been repeatedly used by dominant discourses to signify blackness (and other peoples under Western domination) as brutish and inhuman and therefore representative of a regressive and atavistic rung on the evolutionary ladder.80
Although speaking specifically about the representation of jazz in film, Krin Gabbard argues that the history of black musical performance in American cinema is, in part, the covert representation of a sexuality that is denied overt expression in the bulk of mainstream culture.81 He also suggests that films which locate white men in close proximity to some aspect of black music and dance, either through placing African American performers close to white entertainers or having the white musician/ dancer appear in blackface, often attempt to imbue him with aspects of black sexuality and virility that have hitherto been unavailable to the white star throughout the narrative of the film. For instance, Gabbard notes that
blacking up allowed a certain freedom of sexual expression for Jolson in the first Jazz Singer, just as it did in Swing Time (1936) when Lucky (Fred Astaire) kisses Penny (Ginger Rogers) for the first time just as he is about to apply burnt cork for his performance of “Bojangles of Harlem.”82
The author later remarks, “Many of the white jazz biopics are somewhat more explicit about the impact of black sexuality on the white hero. Rather than allusions through blackface, many of the films bring on real black musicians to transfer the sexual power to the white protagonist.”83 He refers to the Bix Beiderbecke biography, Young Man With a Horn (1950), The Glenn Miller Story (1954), and The Benny Goodman Story (1956), among others. These observations draw on the historical relation between black and white male sexuality in the United States, described by Eric Lott in his aforementioned important work, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. This book focuses on black and white relations through performance culture in the nineteenth century, during the rise of the minstrelsy tradition. A central tenet of Lott’s work suggests that recent European immigrants to the United States attempted to sever associations with their symbolic fatherland, and the values of European masculinity, through an adoption of what they assumed to be an authentic African American mode of performance—blackface minstrelsy. These ethnic groups, such as the Irish and Italians, were interested in rejecting the aura of effeteness and upper-class snobbery that was associated with European masculinity. Lott suggests that donning blackface allowed them to erect a new form of distinctly American masculinity that was grounded in a profound sense of libidinal energy, working-class strength, and popular culture. For these immigrant groups, such potentially liberating forces could be symbolized by the perceived raw power of the black body as it was endlessly reinvented through various modes of blackface.84 Following from this, the alleged potency of black male sexuality in comparison to its white counterpart has often been theorized as an “ur,” or base, instinctual desire that underwrites the representation of interactions between black and white performers in American popular culture to the present day. Of early nineteenth century American minstrels, Lott writes that “in a real sense the minstrel man was the penis, that organ returning in a variety of contexts, at times ludicrous, at others rather less so.”85 By donning blackface, white men were permitted to act on the phallic and sexual desires that had to be repressed in everyday life.86
Gabbard also suggests that the symbolic power of black sexuality was in fact the issuing force for the libido of the white performer in many American films about jazz artists. He suggests that phallic instruments associated with black jazz artists within classical Hollywood film, such as the trumpet and the clarinet, often represent the symbolic equivalent of sexual virility necessary for the white hero to succeed with his romantic endeavors.87 Michael Rogin has made a similar argument in relation to The Jazz Singer. He remarks that the Jewish hero of the film, Jakie Rabinowitz, can only transcend his ethnic origins and truly become American by wearing the somatic markings of blackness.88 This masking of identity offers him success in the entertainment world directly through his performance in blackface, while indirectly imbuing Jakie with the charismatic appeal of a star performer who can win the affections of a beautiful white woman.
While the attributes of black sexuality have functioned as a representational mode in a very unique and potentially empowering way relative to white American masculinity, they have signified an entirely different set of relations vis-à-vis white women, particularly in the American cinema. Numerous scholars have noted that the racist stereotype of the brutal black buck was specifically engineered as a holdover from Southern lynch mob mentality whereby violence against black men was justified through the belief that all black men symbolized a threat to the virginity of white womanhood.89 Of course, this relation was solidified most famously and viciously in D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation.90
Historians of American film have traced two dominant axes along which black sexuality is signified in popular film. This representational schema oscillates between threat (when black performers are close to white women) and transference or investment through proximity (when black performers are close to white men). The relation seems to be heightened by, and very often symbolized through, music and dance performance in the cinema. Flashdance, however, complicates this theory of American sexual identity and race because Alex is a woman who, in some respects, takes on the typical role of the white male in relation to black male sexuality and performance culture.
Clearly, the group of breakdancers encountered in the street by the two young women is not a threat to the tough but tender Alex. In fact, she watches them, completely turning the tables on the film’s incessant objectification of female bodies. This is in line with the complex and ultimately ambiguous delineation of femininity in the film, whereby women must be strong and sexually aggressive but also must know when to acquiesce to the advances and demands of the “right man”—one who will guarantee financial stability and class transcendence.
Alex is imbued with several strikingly male attributes and qualities. She is articulated as sexually aggressive, since we see her suggestively massaging her boss’s groin with her foot while out for dinner at a posh restaurant. When his ex-wife approaches the couple in the same scene, the most memorable line from the encounter is Alex’s smug remark that she “fucked his brains out.” Her sexual power is also reinforced by her aggressive flashdance routines at Mawby’s Bar, which I later discuss in detail. Further, she is physically strong enough to perform a man’s job: welding in the gritty mills of the Pittsburgh steel industry. In fact, the opening sequence of the film deliberately plays with the gender ambiguity of Alex’s character as the camera tracks a lone figure through the Pittsburgh streets into the bowels of the city’s steel mills. When the frontal view of this character is finally revealed, Alex lifts her welder’s mask to expose unexpectedly the face of a beautiful young girl to the viewer.
Even if Alex is delineated as tenacious and persistent regarding her desire to dance, and sexually confident even when pursued by a wealthy older man, the narrative of Flashdance ultimately insists upon forcing women back into submissive roles, dependent upon norms defined by class and gender. Chris Jordan argues that the film appears to support a fluid class structure and flexible gender roles on the surface, but it actually “suggests that a woman’s best means of gaining power is by captivating a man with her body” and that “Alex’s characterization is calculated to play on female adolescents’ physical insecurities.”91 Jordan’s argument does accurately portray the problem of the film in terms of gender and the constant objectification of Alex, aptly noting how the actress playing the lead, Jennifer Beals, is part of a composite ideal woman. She provides the beautiful face for the dramatic sequences and close-ups, while most of the dance scenes utilize Marine Jahan, a different actress and dancer with a “perfect body.” The final scene also uses a professional gymnast, Sharon Shapiro.
Fig. 4.3. Marine Jahan on the cover of Fitness Trade Journal, Summer 1985.
The fact that Beals did not do her own dancing in the film was disclosed through multiple media sources, including the New York Times and the television show Entertainment Tonight, at the time of Flashdance’s release.92 Jahan’s corporeal “ghost” in the film proved especially intriguing to viewers and the dancer was named body of the year by Mademoiselle magazine.93 She also landed jobs advertising for Macy’s and 9 West shoes.94 Jahan promoted this footwear by dancing different numbers in successive pairs of shoes at department stores around the country to the thrill of supportive fans.95 After this stint with fashion advertising, she endorsed and starred in a successful dance exercise video program called “Freedanse,” which, in its opening sequence, utilized the skimpy costumes, dramatic leaps, and pulsating rock music of Flashdance. The performer also appeared on the cover of Fitness Trade Journal in the summer of 1985, still riding the crest of the film’s success as the caption beside her image read “From Flashdance to Fitness.” (fig. 4.3) Jahan’s emergence as a “hidden talent” obscured from viewers in the film was surely an appealing parallel to Flashdance’s narrative. Her subsequent “discovery” and success could no doubt be touted as a “real-life” version of the film’s events.
Fig. 4.4. Richard Colon (Crazy Legs) performs with his crew, Rock Steady, at Lincoln Center in 1981. Photographer: Charlie Ahearn; courtesy of Charlie Ahearn.
The surprising celebrity status of Jahan upon the revelation of her role in the film is, without a doubt, tied to Flashdance’s articulation of female identity as fractured, multifaceted, and unstable in terms of both narrative elements and cinematic strategies of representation (close cropping of female body parts, use of strobe lighting in dance sequences to further suggest the fragmentation of space and bodies). Jahan even remarked that during her audition for the lead role in the film “they didn’t ask me to read, they didn’t ask me to dance. They took a Polaroid, said, ‘Great legs,’ and that was it.”96 Jordan is absolutely right to point out that the film produces an impossible amalgamation of female physical perfection, yet she makes nothing of the fact that within the predominantly white world of the film, the image of female perfection is actually a composite of black, white, and Latino beauty. As noted earlier, Beals is part African American, and one of her body doubles in the final dance scene was none other than the most famous performer of Rock Steady Crew, Richard Colon (Crazy Legs), a Puerto Rican male dancer!
Within the diegesis of the film, though, Alex is clearly articulated as a white character. She lives in a primarily white social milieu, and has a romance with her white boss. Despite the fact that we see her friend Jeannie’s Polish working-class mother and father, Alex’s parents are never glimpsed. Given her ambiguous appearance—honey complexion and dark wavy hair, which the camera repeatedly lingers over—the absence of a specific racialized familial context in which to locate Alex seems all the more striking. The character who fulfills the function of a surrogate parental figure is Hannah, an elderly white former ballerina who mentors Alex’s desire to become a professional dancer. Interestingly, film critic Roger Ebert has even mistakenly assumed that Alex and Jeannie are sisters, which ultimately provides a (false) familial, racial, and ethnic context in which to locate Flashdance’s heroine.97
Flashdance is constrained by the demands of the fairy tale musical, which insists upon the eventual return of patriarchal dominance (signified by Alex’s ultimate capitulation to her boss’s amorous advances) and the formation of a romantic couple. Alex, however, is able to take on the role traditionally defined by white men in relation to the proximity of black performance as an instance of creative contamination, both sexually and in relation to dance/music performance in the film. By insisting on reading Flashdance within the history of the American musical rather than outside of it, as Jordan partially does, I suggest that race plays a large role in the characterization of Alex’s dance ability and sexuality. I argue here that the most important aspects of Alex’s character, her dance talent and sexual power, are in fact predicated upon their proximity to black and Latino performance culture, a relation that culminates in the flashdance sequences.
For instance, the breakdancers do not function on the same level as the other men in the film who constantly objectify Alex, because the male gaze is defined as almost exclusively white. Chris Jordan notes that all the men in Flashdance objectify Alex and her circle of friends, indicating that this is the normative set of relations between men and women on screen. These street breakers, however, are not a threat to Alex because the film signals their relation as one of creative contamination and class alliance rather than sexual desire and intimidation. She stops to watch their street performance and subsequently dances her way across a city intersection. Alex follows their example by playfully dancing in the street as though she has been “infected” by their creative energy after viewing the performance.
The insertion into the film of a racially mixed, all-male breakdancing crew, along with a nearly exclusively black street audience (except for Alex and Jeannie), serves several functions within the narrative. It underscores the “authenticity” and “naturalness” of Alex’s talent by identifying her with the status of black street dance. American cinema has habitually emphasized the “naturalness” of black talent in relation to music and dance. This apparent compliment actually implies a deeply racist sentiment: that blacks are “genuine” and innate entertainers because all they do is “play” rather than work. Music and dance punctuates everyday life, transforming all work time into “play,” a process that undoubtedly assuages anxieties about the ethos of coerced and underpaid black labor in American history, and one that relies on the misconception that dancing is in fact a “playful” pastime rather than a strenuous and difficult art to master.98 The association between African Americans and spontaneous, “natural” dance talent is apparent in early cinematic examples in which black characters break into a dance number for no obvious reason. The Watermelon Patch (1905) and the 1927 version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin both show dance as a “natural” part of African American life and movement entering into the rhythm of everyday encounters without any apparent motivation. Later Hollywood musicals that featured black entertainers, such as the Bill Robinson–Shirley Temple films The Little Colonel, The Littlest Rebel, and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938), also perpetuate this racist trope. The breakdance scene underscores Alex’s “street” credibility and innate ability by linking her talent with the dance style and posturing of urban black masculinity. Not only is Alex capable of spontaneous performance in the street but she also hones her abilities in the gritty warehouse space of her apartment rather than in the refined spaces of an expensive dance conservatory (however, this is the ultimate goal for the budding dance star). Although Alex “sells out” at the end of the film and leaves the “street” behind for a high-class dance school, we have been assured of the authenticity of her talent early on in the narrative through this scene, which connects her abilities to African American dance.
Alex’s identification with the breakdancers also points to a main theme of the narrative—that Alex’s dance talent is explicitly related to her untamed, natural, and raw sexuality. This link is very closely connected to Gabbard’s reading of black and white relations in jazz biopics whereby a black musician’s very presence can imbue a white performer with both sexual prowess and a newfound musical capability. Her proximity to black dance culture enhances her own performance abilities, which in turn are revealed as the source of her sexual energy and power. However, the historically determined relation between whites and blacks, and the representation of music and dance in American cinema, are significantly altered because Alex is a woman. Thus, the momentary pairing of Alex with a group of street performers plays on (but also transforms) the presumed assumptions about black and white performance traditions and sexual power.
If the Rock Steady Crew teaches her a few moves, this exchange also imbues Alex with the ability to enact an aggressive sexual persona in her nightclub routine and personal life. Such a relation is very clearly evoked in Alex’s initial dance performance at Mawby’s Bar, in which she makes extensive use of mime and other electric boogie moves in highly eroticized dance sequences. Through the subsequent street performance of the Rock Steady Crew, the film later suggests that Alex has lifted this set of moves from black-identified street dance culture. In fact, Flashdance explores the notion of sexual “contagion” through performance relations between blacks and whites in the classical period and reforms them in order to incorporate attitudes towards gender and performance in the 1980s that were informed by a revival of conservative thought in American culture.
There is a continuum in the film between the initial club performance and the street dance scene with the Rock Steady Crew that explains the film’s use of black dance to articulate the gendered and classed subjectivity of the heroine. The first dance number introduces Alex in male clothing as she enters the stage in an oversized man’s suit (similar to a zoot suit), performing breakdance style electric boogie moves. However, after she rips the man’s suit from her body to reveal a skimpy red piece of lingerie her dance moves transform into a modern-style jazz dance, abruptly leaving all breakdance coding behind. The movements of this newly feminized version of Alex, who sports a red diaphanous “teddy,” become much more erotic and geared toward sexual arousal. This number implies that Alex’s transformation into a highly erotic and aggressive female persona requires a masquerade of masculinity, one that is borrowed from the street and from black youth culture. She not only adopts the street dance style of communities of color but she also dons a zoot suit, the uniform of black and Latino youth culture during the 1940s.99
Flashdance seems to suggest that the adoption of black and Latino performance style is at the very heart of Alex’s ability to transform herself on stage. In this light, I do not find the film to be as simplistic in terms of gender coding as Jordan and other writers have made it out to be. Previous criticism argues that the intersection of class and gender inequities are the only significant forces affecting Alex’s transformation, and that the film is only interested in showing that women must acquiesce to the feminine ideals of physical perfection and, ultimately, submissiveness if they are to achieve success. For Jordan, the concluding dance sequence is the final “sell out” and reinforcement of hierarchical boundaries because Alex wins a place at the prestigious dance academy, accepts help from Nick in securing the audition, and submits to his desires for her. In my reading, however, these final moments of the film are somewhat conflicted in terms of social, racial, and sexual hierarchies since the enduring image of Alex’s triumph in an all-white, upper-class dance conservatory is, in fact, a Puerto Rican male body executing a backspin—the hallmark move of the breakdance tradition. Moreover, the use of multiple body doubles for Alex’s dance routines is apparent to the spectator, at least upon repeated viewings.
In spite of the assumption that the film works to reorient sexual relations in a more conservative direction, Flashdance offers a very ambivalent image of female sexuality linked to its representation of black and Latino street dance.100 Alex’s sexual identity and dance ability (aspects of her character that are often collapsed in the film) both rely on their proximity to street dance, while at the same time specific breakdance moves are stolen and incorporated into both white upper-class dance conservatories and working-class cultural spaces such as Mawby’s. The successful transformation from working-class locales into upper-class cultural spaces requires that Alex maintain a link to racially and ethnically “Other” realms of cultural expression (but not necessarily “Other” communities), symbolized by the inclusion of street dance moves in her audition for the Pittsburgh Dance Company. This is made explicit in the final performance audition scene. A stone-faced panel of judges warms to Alex only after she makes an error, boldly starts again, and uses the street moves we have seen earlier in the film. This suggests that her entry into the conservatory is dependent upon the incorporation of breakdance choreography into the routine rather than a mastery of conventional dance abilities. The history of doubling, uncredited talent, and submerged racial identity in Flashdance firmly locates it within the kind of anxious framework drawn by Clover in her discussion of Singin’ in the Rain. Jahan’s inexplicable meteoric rise to fame can thus be read as a symptom of such anxieties whereby the public seized upon her persona as a viable substitute for the “real” talent that has been continually appropriated and plundered by American musical film.
The link between the dance conservatory (and professional dance more generally) and breakdancing in the final scene of Flashdance is not one of mere fantasy. In truth, this relation was an actual space of cultural interaction in the early 1980s. For instance, breakdancers appeared on the cover of Ballet News in August of 1984, while several New York Broadway and Off-Broadway shows welcomed “street trained” breakdancers into their performance spaces. An article from Dance Magazine in the same year noted that the New York musical “The Tap Dance Kid features a brief break-dancing number performed by Alfonso Ribeiro” and “Rick Atwell’s forthcoming Off-Broadway musical Street Heat will include breakers Atwell recruited off sidewalks throughout New York City.”101 Ribeiro, a twelve-year-old with no formal dance training, was nominated for an Outer Critics Circle Award.102 He also captured the attention of Michael Jackson, who, after witnessing his performance in the show, invited him to his Los Angeles home.103 Another dancer from The Tap Dance Kid, Jimmy Tate, appeared at a promotional event with breaking crew Rhythm Technicians to advertise the aforementioned Swatch Watch World Breakdance Championship.
In addition, the San Francisco Ballet showcased numerous breakdancers in its opening gala performance that year.104 An article in the Christian Science Monitor, also appearing in 1984, asks of breakdancing: “Is this a flash in the pan or will it last?”105 The piece goes on to state that some dancers are “studying jazz or modern dance to continue a dancing career if break dancing dies out.”106 At the outset of that year, the New York Post ran an article discussing an event during which two important ballerinas from the city—Malinda Roy of the New York City Ballet and Beatrice Rodrigues of Joffrey Ballet—met and danced with the Kid Fresh breakdance crew at Minskoff Rehearsal Hall in midtown Manhattan.107 This space was associated with the most prestigious dance companies, as it was extensively used by shows scheduled to premiere on Broadway. Promoter Akiva Talmi apparently staged the event in order to bring attention to his attempts at fusing street dance, ballet, and theatrical production values, which resulted in the launching of a multi-city national tour entitled Breakdance U.S.A. This show was “a multimedia event with choreographed breakdancers that also included other aspects of the hip hop scene—rap, song, live DJs, and MCs.”108 Breakdance U.S.A. also featured special effects such as “laser beams, smoke pod explosions, strobes, and flames.”109 Numerous other examples of this type of cultural fusion appear in a variety of articles, visual imagery, cinema, and actual conservatory programs from the era. Ballet, a dance form that “denies the substantiality of flesh by defying the forces of gravity” and “makes the body ethereal,”110 became closely linked with the new form of folk culture that changed “the gravity point of dance from top to bottom” and demanded that people “dance not just with their bodies, but on their bodies.”111
Fig. 4.5. Jimmy Tate with the Rhythm Technicians, Aug. 23, 1984. Photographer: Jim Hughes; courtesy of the New York Daily News.
I am intrigued by three aspects of the relationship between ballet and breakdancing here. Firstly, I am concerned with the way in which debates about gender and dance manifest themselves in both art forms (I have addressed gender and breaking above). Secondly, there are the various forms of co-optation that primarily white mainstream interests utilized in order to bring “the street” into the conservatory and recital halls. Thirdly, I address the way in which these two issues are so integral to the representation of breakdance in film in the early eighties.
Most printed text and images that featured female breakers usually noted that women primarily participated in electric boogie and locking and popping, not the close-to-the-ground breaking, which demanded very intense athletic ability and strength—the kind of dance where a performer truly dances “on their bodies.” This kind of breaking—floor work such as head-spins, backspins, and windmills—was, with a few exceptions, the purview of men. Even though prominent choreographer and dancer Rosanne Hoare proudly asserts that she is “one of the first females … ever to do straight break work,” very few women actually followed her lead.112 Most likely, the intense upper body strength needed to perform the kind of floor work that this dance style requires made it more suitable for men.
Contemporaneous with the emergence of hip hop culture in the later 1970s, debates about gender and ballet began to surface in magazines and journals dedicated to study of institutionalized dance. The first book devoted entirely to the study of men in ballet, Danseur: The Male in Ballet, was published in 1977.113 Cobbett Steinberg explored this topic in his article “Dancing Men,” which appeared in the 1978/9 Winter issue of Ballet Review.114 An interesting piece, entitled “Masculinity in Dance,” which was partly a response to the above article, attempted to clarify just what was at stake in forcefully asserting the masculinity of dancing men. The author, Igor Youskevitch, noted that previous explorations of masculinity in ballet often drew attention to the supposed hallmarks of “manliness” in the lives of male ballet dancers outside of the dance world—for instance, an interest in sports. Youskevitch points out that this of course has nothing to do with the presentation of masculinity through dance. This quality, he suggests
is based on personal “philosophy” and approach to interpretation which has nothing to do with being just strong and athletic. As a matter of fact, over-masculinity in dance produces as adverse an impression as complete lack of it. The image of a football player has no room on the ballet stage.115
Youskevitch argues that expressions of masculinity through dance can only be measured as an abstract quality captured in a performer’s own unique ability. One of the most well-known attempts to link male dance with more conventional notions of masculine sport comes from the “greatest,” or at least the most famous American dancing man on the big screen, Gene Kelly. Throughout his life, Kelly continually emphasized the athletic ability that dance required, forever attempting to negate the popular opinion that dance was primarily the forte of women and “effeminate” men.116 Both Steinberg and Yousketvitch mention Life magazine articles from 1963 that covered the lives and interests of male ballet stars, heavily emphasizing sports and other “manly” interests. While concerns about the overall masculinity of male dancers punctuated popular media prior to the 1970s, it did not become a subject of academic debate until the middle of the decade.
Dance scholar Ramsay Burt notes that presenting masculinity through movement was a preoccupation of American mid-century modern dance. Choreographers such as Ted Shawn reinvented the male dancer with “a heavy-handed return to ideals of ‘natural,’ essential, instinctive, and ‘traditional’ masculinity,” as an antidote to the supposedly overtly feminine sphere of European-derived ballet.117 These expressions of a supposedly natural American masculinity appropriated non-Western identities, which had been championed by mid-century modernism as examples of natural, raw, and unmediated masculinity.118 The nineteenth century specter of minstrelsy, in which black identities were utilized to express forbidden, repressed, or frustrated white sexual desire through dance, returned to the American stage during the mid-twentieth century and again in the 1980s.
While ballet has traditionally been associated with female dancers, the male ballet star “eclipsed ballerinas in terms of salary, media attention, and drawing power at the box office” in the 1970s and ’80s.119 This revived interest in masculinity and ballet is undoubtedly linked to a rise in the popularity of male dancers at this time, an occurrence unprecedented for twentieth century ballet, save for the renown of Vaslav Nijinsky during the Edwardian period. An astute Village Voice article on the recent increase in numbers of male ballet dancers in the late ’70s noted that “no art is recognized as an art until men do it.”120 Men were becoming superstars in one of the only artistic fields dominated by women for over a century, and the newfound “star” status of male ballet dancers such as Rudolf Nureyev, and later Mikhail Baryshnikov, seemed to surpass the level of artistic success and fame enjoyed primarily by women. The authors of Danseur: The Male in Ballet, Richard Philip and Mary Whitney, note that although Nijinsky reintroduced the star danseur in ballet at a time when “a stigma was attached to men who dared to make a career of ballet,” this renewed interest in the male dancer did not continue.121 However, the 1960s and ’70s in particular witnessed “a tremendous resurgence of interest in the danseur, in his technique, acting, and roles.”122
Male ballet dancers were ascending the ranks and becoming more plentiful at about the same time breakdance emerged. Therefore, the enthusiasm with which many ballet companies, choreographers, and producers embraced the male breakdancer must bear some relation to the legitimation of male ballet dancers as athletes, and the justification of their craft as a muscular and powerful “manly” art form. Philip and Whitney even refer to the danseur as “ballet’s equivalent of the sports hero.”123 They go on to note that
it has become evident that the work of the danseur, who must combine strength, precision, timing, and spatial awareness with grace, musicality, and stage presence, is directly comparable to that of the athlete. Much like athletes, the danseur requires years of training to perfect his form and a daily class routine to warm up his muscles and protect him against an injury that might suddenly end his career. And few sports require the stamina, versatility, and sheer physical daring demanded of the male dancer in ballet today.124
Given the emphasis on athleticism in the above quote, it is not surprising that some choreographers and dancers actually welcomed breakdance as a form that would reinvigorate and permanently change ballet. Associating male ballet with urban dance originating in communities of color—a practice related in numerous accounts to hyper-masculinity, competition, and occasionally violence—could be seen as a strategic ploy to bolster the mainstream appeal of the male ballet dancer for North American audiences. Talmi asserted that “the dance world is starving for a new movement to revitalize both the classical and the modern idiom, and within a few years, every important stage is going to have breakdancing performed on it.”125 At the same time that breakdance could be envisioned as ballet’s new creative grounding force, descriptions of the emerging dance form often characterized it as raw, brutal, overtly and aggressively masculine, and an outlet to “release competitive energies.”126 These qualities are directly antithetical to the careful, precise, and predominantly feminine attributes usually associated with the European tradition of ballet.127
The desire of mainstream commercial interests to capitalize on this relation took up a particular form of active recruitment of young breakers into the academy. For instance, while dance promoter Talmi attempted a forty-city tour of the United States in order to bring street dance into Carnegie Hall,128 the San Francisco Ballet created a community outreach program in the mid-1980s which embarked on
a two-way exchange with the breakdancers who lived in a nearby ghetto neighborhood. Forty-six local teenagers performed a surprise finale during the company’s opening night gala in July. Fourteen boys were given scholarships to the ballet school. At the same time they became the San Francisco Ballet Breakers.129
This large-scale outreach effort by the ballet conservatory and other established dance entities to black and Latino youth can be seen in a variety of ways. For instance, it might be understood as a racist and malevolent institutional effort to control and sanitize the “raw” and “unrefined” energy of African American and Latino men, thereby redirecting any potential social disorder associated with racial “Otherness” into creative but orchestrated scenarios. Alternately, this conjunction might also be understood as a philanthropic and truly positive source of creative interchange whereby unrefined talent is managed by apparently benevolent mainstream institutions in order to benefit those who would not otherwise have access to formal training. While Talmi seems interested in exploiting the “next big thing” associated with youth and popular culture, the San Francisco Ballet’s outreach program appears to be an honest attempt to integrate an institution of high culture with its surrounding environment to the benefit of both.
In this same vein, eminent choreographer Julie Arenal endeavored to merge ballet with breakdance in her company’s productions On the Move and The City. Both performances premiered in 1984 at the Spoleto Festival USA in South Carolina before moving onto the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, and the New York Express Company Theatre.130 While a press release detailing these two productions stresses the need to order the improvisational aspect of breaking, it also emphasizes the hard work and dedication that has led to the unique and original lexicon of breakdance:
Choreographer Julie Arenal has taken this phenomenon and shaped it into a traditional performance mode, using the raw energy of her performers aged 14–20 who hail from all five boroughs of New York. Rather than merely presenting breakdancing in its original demonstrational context, Ms. Arenal is the first to structure this exciting dance into the fine arts idiom. Although essentially unstructured, breakdancing has a highly developed vocabulary. The performers “train” through intensive practice sessions, working with their friends to develop a routine which is then “performed” in the streets, ghettos, and discos. The dancers spend most of their free time developing their individual specialties, which include “the moon walk,” “the wave,” and “breaking.”131
This press release repeatedly stresses the way in which Arenal has shaped, transformed, and even distilled the raw idiom of breakdance. Nevertheless, the resulting productions appear to have retained some important aspect of breakdancing—for instance, the association of a breaker with one particular move or style of breaking. On the Move was apparently designed to “highlight each performer’s uniqueness.” The City was also an attempt to present the experiences and difficulties faced by urban youth through dance techniques. In this respect, the shows appear to have worked towards a positive articulation of hip hop culture in which the creativity and resourcefulness of inner-city residents was set against the larger social and economic difficulties that plagued the dancers’ communities.
Arenal’s shows sought to retain some element of breaking’s improvisational and urban “essence” as they transformed the idiom for theatrical venues. While improvisation is usually an element of breakdance touted as integral to the art form, Beat Street’s choreographer, Julliard-trained Lester Wilson, intimated that this not the case:
What these kids do is carefully thought through. … To choreograph this film, I had to study their movements closely, see how they could be captured by the camera. … The discipline involved was to have them go over specific movements again and again until I captured it on film most effectively.132
Clearly, Wilson’s words were meant to validate his role in the production by emphasizing the hard work involved in creating breakdance routines that would transfer successfully to the big screen, but he also argues for the commercial viability of the dance form by suggesting that it lends itself to organized cinematic choreography. Furthermore, the choreographer placed breaking alongside established forms like modern dance and ballet, and predicted that this urban street dance would “continue to develop as an idiom” and “assimilate new kinds of movement.”133
Professional breaking crews were starring in feature films and also making relatively large sums of money performing at public events, appearing in commercial advertisements, and winning contests during 1984 and 1985.134 The initial promise of breaking was certainly connected to the possibility of earning a lot of money very quickly. However, after the initial dance craze had subsided, the breaker was the one figure within the hip hop structure who was actually left without a career track or the potential to continue earning from his craft (except on street corners and the odd hip hop retrospective event). The DJ and the rapper have dominated more recent hip hop culture, and have seen a windfall of financial success. Less lucrative and more marginally, some graffiti writers have continued to work in the art world with moderate success.135 Rarely, however, has the breaker found a similar way to maintain a viable career after the breakdancing hype subsided.136 Akiva’s prediction seems to have been dead wrong. With few exceptions, breakdancers faded into the background to make way for the rapper and DJ.137
Utopian attempts to combine ballet and breakdance proposed an art form that promised not only racial crossings but those of gender and class as well. The current of producers interested in this hybrid form tapped into the allure of a handful of emerging male ballet stars while assuring audiences that male dancers, although performing a dance style associated with women in the later half of the twentieth century, were overtly masculine and ardently athletic. This assurance was borrowed from, and even underwritten by, the displays of African American and Latino male sexual power associated with breakdancing. As we have seen, this relation has been repeated in American forms of popular and avant-garde performance, from nineteenth-century minstrel troupes to twentieth-century modernist dance recitals. Interestingly, this hybrid form also offers a return to ballet’s “lowbrow” past. Although associated with “high culture,” ballet has often incorporated folk elements (for instance, in the Russian genre of Character Dance). During the nineteenth century in France, ballet was also associated with prostitution. Ballet companies culled young girls from the working and lower classes to train as ballerinas, and these dancers interacted with affluent patrons backstage in an atmosphere characterized by historian Richard Kendall as “a virtual market-place for transactions between wealthy abonnés and underpaid dancers.”138
The imaginings of a hybrid dance style that combined ballet and breakdance were largely naïve and shortsighted. All of the power lay in the hands of the producers, managers, and promoters of shows and institutions that attempted to bring this dance union to fruition. These individuals (who were, with few exceptions, professionally trained) brought black and Latino street dance to the threshold of European culture, incorporating it within its vocabulary. The asymmetrical power relations in this relationship are glaringly obvious. In many examples, cultural expression emerging within communities of color is co-opted by larger mainstream artistic entities and put in the service of further developing a European-born idiom. In early 1984, Ken Sandler noted that
promoter Talmi, the front-runner in moving breakdancing off the streets and onto the ballet stage, has already hired a leading young ballet choreographer—Mary Giannone—to turn breakdance routines into narrative ballets and he has developed a number of other breakdance presentation techniques.139
This article ends with a quote from Talmi, who continued to work with Russian ballet productions. He proclaims of breakdancing: “First in the streets, now in nightclubs, next in Carnegie Hall.”140 The piece suggests that breakdancing will only become a “legitimate” art form after filtration through a European lens. Breakdancing is articulated as raw and unformed, in need of both “taming” and narrativizing, in order to be fit for consumption by “a trendy, culture-oriented audience.”141 Arrogant assumptions voiced by Talmi and others very plainly exposed how the idiom of breakdance was at risk as mainstream commercial interests attempted to absorb and reconfigure this “authentic” cultural product. Firstly, Talmi’s comments (and the general attitude of the above article) reveal a classist and ethnocentric view of performance success whereby the goal of a street-derived art form is containment within the confines of upper-class and largely white-owned institutions. Secondly, nearly all accounts of breakdance within academic and institutional spaces insist on the need for a structuring and narrativizing of the form. The resulting cultural collaborations usually attempted to force breakdancing into the mold of an already established European cultural tradition, purging the dance style of its improvisational elements. Much like the earliest critiques of jazz, mainstream critics, practitioners, and writers faulted breakdance for an apparent lack of composition and order.142
These same tensions between mainstream and more marginal cultural spaces surface in nearly all hip hop-oriented films from this decade. The perils of maneuvering in the entertainment industry for individuals from poverty-stricken inner-city communities were racialized and privatized in the hip hop musical of the 1980s. Paradoxically, films such as Wild Style, Rappin’, and Beat Street also insisted on connecting personal struggles to the needs and interests of the larger community. In contrast, Flashdance allows Alex to leave the mill, the street, and the dance club behind, and for the most part, no traces of any communal relations exist at the end of the film—just the image of a smiling, happy, and wealthy white couple. Collaborations between the dance academy and urban breakdancing culture resulted in actual creative interactions in which progressive and positive cultural interchange was attainable (though rarely achieved), but Flashdance suppresses this possibility by focusing only on the trajectory of its “white” heroine who emerges victorious from the dance conservatory in the narrative of the film. However, as I have stated earlier, the final image of Crazy Legs does act as a repressed reminder of the ways in which the film actually constructs the sexual identity and dance talent of Alex. Both aspects of her character are contingent upon her relationship to black and Latino-inspired urban street culture. The film uses different class-identified spaces of cultural performance—the dance academy, the street, and the working-class bar—to showcase its use of breakdance. These spaces link the evolution of the heroine (from low-class stripper to successful dancer) with the transformative powers of black performance historically associated with white male entertainers in nineteenth-century minstrelsy shows and Hollywood blackface.
Even though I have focused on masculinity and blackness in my account of the “actual” spaces of interactions between official dance institutions and breakdance, socioeconomic relations and the representation of women within the space of the dance academy do seem to be integral aspects of films featuring breakdance in the 1980s. Along with Flashdance, the Breakin’ series provides an intricate and interesting textual map in which to chart this argument. Kelly, the white female lead of the two films, played by Lucinda Dickey, was cast because of her dance ability, as were male leads, Adolfo Quinones and Michael Chambers, two dancers from communities of color. It is not surprising therefore that the realism of the scenarios is largely hampered by poor acting skills (since the stars were not seasoned professional actors), while the films’ main attractions are flamboyant dance choreography, colorful and ostentatious costume design, and emerging musical talent. This particular situation should not be surprising given that some of the very earliest exploitation films centered on music and aimed at a youth audience, such as America’s first rock ’n’ roll flicks, settled for a similar trade-off.143 However, as Thomas Doherty has pointed out, the narratives of these earlier films still provided important social meanings for their juvenile audience, and presented youth culture as a unique experience that was separate from, and often at odds with, adult life. For this reason, he notes, they should be looked at critically in their historical context, regardless of the “quality” of acting, writing, and other usual judgment criteria. Following Doherty’s lead, the same methodology should be undertaken in looking at the Breakin’ films. Like Flashdance, these exploitation films were largely organized around the gendering and racialization of performance spaces. They spoke to particular historical connections, such as the unique relation between popular culture and race that emerged with the appearance of the first breakers on midtown Manhattan street corners. These films also addressed the gendering of hip hop culture as it interacted with spaces of “cultural authority” and conventional theatrical performance.
At the beginning of Breakin’, Kelly is associated with the rehearsal rooms of the dance academy, toiling for a sadistic and predatory instructor who teaches modern jazz dance. The space of institutional dance is articulated as somewhat threatening, presided over by white male authority. In Flashdance, too, the Pittsburgh Conservatory of Dance and Repertory is shown to be a frightening and unfriendly space as leering eyes gawk at Alex’s unkempt and unprofessional appearance when she first attempts to obtain an audition at the nearly all-white academy.
However, while these two films articulate the spaces of the professional dance academy in a similar manner, they deal with racially “Other” sexual desire in very divergent ways. Flashdance repeatedly yet covertly acknowledges the power of black sexuality and dance performance. In this film, we are even privy to an unabashed, albeit racist and reductive, expression of black sexuality in the previously discussed workout scene. And, as I have been arguing throughout the chapter, African American sexuality is a central, yet continually repressed theme (with the exception of the workout scene), in Flashdance. Breakin’ further nullifies black and Latino sexual desire within the narrative, especially in relation to the link between performance success and heterosexual coupling. Firstly, Kelly is introduced to “street dance” culture by an African American male dancer named Cupcake—an absurd “queen” stereotype who flits through the film in lavender tights—while Kelly infantilizes him with childish dialogue and nicknames. Secondly, even though Ozone is the “music man” of the film, he fails to secure any kind of romantic union with Kelly in either of the Breakin’ features. He is jealous of her relationships with white men, and neither of the films ever suggest that Kelly is even cognizant of the nature of Ozone’s amorous desires. Although he appears onstage with his desired other at the end of both films, successful performance does not equal successful romantic partnering in these works. As noted in previous chapters, the Hollywood show musical habitually constructs a narrative in which romantic coupling is linked with significant achievements in the world of professional music and dance. This equation is nearly always signified at the end of the film when the male and female leads are revealed together in a public performance scenario. In both Breakin’ films, however, the “music man” must be content with performance success only. Nevertheless, in order to propel the narrative forward and satisfy some aspects of the genre, Ozone must express his attraction for Kelly. Breakin’ 2 also follows the pattern of a traditional show musical in that we witness a final production number at the end of the film, and see the lead couple onstage together. Up until this point, however, the film continually assures the viewer that Kelly does not reciprocate Ozone’s feelings, thereby circumventing the connection between performance success and the formation of a romantic partnership.
Black sexual desire is either repressed or infantilized in these films, and Kelly, like Alex, can only find her way to real performance success through “street dance.” Kelly must leave the almost all-white space of the academy and cross over into the world of urban dance in order to find her way back to a successful professional career and the stage. She does not discover a way to enact a sexualized dance persona through her dalliances with urban black masculinity in the same way that Alex does. The white female star of Breakin’ merely finds a way to rebel against her conservative parents and uptight dance teacher. However, both women must encounter an alternative and unfettered performance mode linked to a masculine, racially “Other,” and lower-class culture in order to stand out and become successful in the staid world of professional dance.
Ed Guerrero has convincingly argued that Hollywood cinema of this era attempted to negotiate and contain the threat of a rising tide of black political power through certain blockbuster formulas, including the interracial buddy film, science-fiction extravaganzas, and the Rocky series. He further notes that “black sexuality in the 1980s was either constructed as something entirely perverse or, more often, absent in mainstream cinema.”144 This chapter adds to his assessment by showing the ways in which black desire could be negotiated by conventional cinema in more subtle and complex ways. Neither entirely absent nor “perverse,” the examples discussed in this chapter explore how the simultaneous exposure and repression of the sexualities and desires of people of color have always been part of the classic Hollywood musical genre. While films such as Flashdance and the Breakin’ series repress the subjectivity and desire of racial “Others,” the strongest expressions of dance ability and creativity (and therefore potent sexuality, according to the logic of the classical musical) nonetheless always emanate from black and Latino urban culture.
Breakdancing left its imprint on film culture of the 1980s while also impacting an astonishingly wide array of cultural ephemera, social spaces, and media. But it was not, as others have argued, simply an aggressive expression of black masculinity, a mating ritual, or an activity that had overwhelmingly negative consequences for women. Rather, representations of the dance style in myriad media reveal that it functioned in a number of ways that offered a potentially empowering performance space to women as well. The apparent hyper masculinity of the dance style was also employed to alter public perception of other mainstream performance cultures, such as ballet. Especially in the case of cinema, the practice of breakdancing became a threshold activity where bodies (female bodies, in particular) could transgress boundaries of race, class, and even gender.
