| (The following article is from the book "BREAKING and THE NEW YORK CITY BREAKERS" written by Michael Holman in the early '80s.) It was the robots on TV Shows in the early '60s like "Lost in Space" that inspired black kids in Los Angeles to invent the dance called The Robot. Obviously mime was inspirational in the development and perfecting of The Robot. The sense of animation and futurism is strong in most poor inner-city kids because it's an escape to a world where everything is perfect, sharp and in control. The hydraulic movements of the robot danced to music which was becoming more and more mechanically rhythmic, like James Brown's "Goodfoot" (1969), was a natural development in Los Angeles, a city of major street dance creations. In 1969, a young black man by the name of Don Campbell was becoming known among street dancers in Los Angeles for inventing a dance called the Capbellock (he put out a record called "Do the Campbellock"). Don Campbell took the Hydraulic robotic movements, which were all about total control and mixed it with wild, out of control body movement dances of the tap-flash dance days plus exact stop and start movements and spiced it all with comic facial expressions and clown-like costumes to develop a whole new dance movement which is still going strong called "Locking" (created from Campbellocking.)The best way to describe the movement of locking would be thus: The body moves out of control then back into control snapping into position, collapsing then snapping back. By the early 70's Don Campbell had put together a whole crew of lockers called "The Lockers." One of the lockers was Shabadoo, the star of "Breaking," and Penguin, who was the chubby locker named "Rerun" on the TV Show "What's Happening." The lockers of the early 70's wore platform shoes, loud striped socks, pegged pants that stopped at the knees, bright colorful satin shirts with big collars, big colorful bow ties, gigantic Apple Boy hats, and white gloves. Also around the time "soul Train" hit the air (1972) and it became an instant media hit by featuring street dancers, especially The Lockers, of Los Angeles. The nightclub Crenshaw Flats the apartment on Creshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles was where the "Soul Train" gang hung out. At the time breaking was developing in New York, locking and The Robot were getting popular in southern California. During 1972 and '73 in Fresno, California, a black family of all boys were inventing something new of their own. They called their dance the Electric Boogaloo. Pistol Pete and his brothers had created The Electric Boogaloo by combining locking. The Robot, and the more smooth and controlled movements of mime. 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. The Electric Boogaloo became big in San Francisco even before it hit Los Angeles but when it did hit L.A., it was introduced through "Soul Train" as the new dance form and challenged the popularity of locking. The Electric Boogaloo has since spread to New York as breaking later hit Los Angeles. It's interesting to see breaking and locking existing in the same sub-cultures. I think it's partly because they complement each other as opposites. The Electric Boogie is in control and tends to imitate the movements of nature like a lightning bolt or a rippling river, whereas breaking is more out of contro and anti-nature or anti-gravitational like a flying saucer. Another reason they're done together with the same kids may also be that they're both competitive dances where dancers battle each other to determine who's best. - BACK- |
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| Dance Styles: Popping and Locking |