On a cordoned-off street in the heart of this city, Aleksandr Pushkin, Russia’s great 19th Century poet, watched an unusual sight before his carved stone eyes. Not the hundreds of soldiers and police marching by, which he would have seen before. Nor the thousands of Muscovites carrying balloons and flags to celebrate the 860th anniversary of the founding of the capital.
No, it was Sergey Bokov spinning on his hands, head and back to the rhythm of James Brown in a blend of acrobatics and aggressive hip-hop dance.
When Bokov, who uses mock violence in his dance routines, was awarded victory in the battle with one opponent, an onstage scuffle broke out. Those watching seemed a little confused, offering only polite applause for the performance. “I think this is the first time most of the crowd has seen break dancing,” said Bokov, 23, as he pulled his baseball cap back on after the show.
Anti-American sentiment may be big in Russian politics right now, a sure vote-winner for the country’s leaders, but the popular embrace of Western culture is at an all-time high, including a community of fervent break dance disciples who live, sleep and eat the break dance, or b-boy, life.
“It’s how I earn money, it’s how I relax, it’s how I dance,” said Abdul Anasov, 23, a member of the dance crew Mafia 13, who teaches break dancing. “It’s really my life.”
Russia’s a special case
From its roots in the Bronx in the 1970s, the dance style has won passionate converts from South Korea to Germany, who perform and compete against one another with moves and hip-hop dress that would have earned respect in New York City in the early 1980s. One of the biggest b-boy events, the Battle of the Year, takes place in Braunschweig, Germany.
But Russia is a special case. The small, passionate following break dancing enjoys seems emblematic of a divide between the anti-Western rhetoric of leaders and the cultural appetites of many ordinary Russians, especially younger ones.
“Politics doesn’t influence us at all,” said Vadim Toporenok, 23, who is also a member of Mafia 13.
Toporenok gave up a career as a trained chef to teach and perform break dancing. “We are free people; we are free-styling; and we can communicate with Spanish, Germans, English, Americans,” he said.
Yegor Sheremetyev, who started the dance school where Toporenok works when he was just 17, agreed. “B-boying has nothing to do with politics,” he said. “There is no dislike because it is from America. The youth, they are free from all that.”
But Sheremetyev does admit he learned break dancing to impress girls.
Russia’s ambivalent embrace of the West is centuries-old. Mark Steinberg, a professor of Russian history and editor of Slavic Review, a journal based in Champaign, Ill., recalled the lavish parties known as “assemblees” given by Peter the Great, where the czar’s court dressed in the latest French fashions.
“Break dancing isn’t exactly the same,” Steinberg said, “but it’s the same notion of ‘We can adapt anything that exists in the West, we can make it part of our own.'”
Variation on a theme
Russian b-boys are clear about break dancing’s roots. “It came to us mostly from America,” said Maksim Pavlenko, 29, a product manager at a food additives company. “But we have just developed our own strain, our own direction, separately, but exactly in the hip-hop, the break-dance, the funk style.”
When many people think of Russian traditional dance, they see the cross-armed crouching Cossack dance, a type of floor-level can-can, which represents Russians’ close connection to the land. This can still be seen in the way some of the dancers perform.
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“There is this particular spirituality connected to earth and sky and trees,” Steinberg said. “One sees that in traditional Russian village religions, which never really went away.”
Just as in America, Russian cities are full of young people dressed in sagging jeans, bandannas and T-shirts. Many take their influence — and learn the basics of break dancing — as many young Americans do, from hip-hop videos on MTV. But there is also an old school of Russian b-boying that somehow managed to catch on in the Soviet era, when rap music and break dancing were prohibited as representations of Western culture.
“I saw a Soviet Union propaganda documentary about ‘the bad life’ of the USA,” recalled Dima Morovkin, 38, known as Master Crab, who learned his moves in the ’80s. “There was just a small fragment where black kids were dancing in the streets, and the documentary said that big American gangsters were making them dance to earn money,” he added, laughing.
Morovkin didn’t believe what the documentary said, but he believed his eyes: a dance full of energy and rebellion.
“B-boying is like a spirit of freedom, of self expression, a way of being unique that was not appreciated by the Soviet Union,” he said. “Each time we danced in the street, the Soviet police came and told us to stop, accusing us of anti-Soviet propaganda. This was a very big inspiration for us to do it more and more and more.”