‘Pop, drop and lock’: Break Dancing Club promotes voter registration

Locking, jiving, move-popping; so you think you can
breakdance?

Footwork, tops, power moves, freeze; so you really think you can breakdance?

B-boys and b-girls, crews and battles cyphering until the late morning, this is break dancing.

And for junior Justin Wolverton, breakdancing is life.

“I breakdance because it gets steam off, (it’s) really fun, great exercise and the cultural influence is amazing,” he said. “There are a lot of ways to express yourself.”

Wolverton, who started break-dancing two years ago to get in shape, is the president of IU’s Break Dancing Club.

“I was overweight when I first started,” Wolverton said. “It just became something I got a passion about.”

Break dancing, or breaking, is the original hip-hop dance performed throughout the country, from the streets of New York to the warehouses in Los Angeles to its newest home on the curbs outside Ballantine Hall.

Wolverton said they’re break-dancing outside Ballantine to increase voter registration and to draw bigger crowds.

Their influence is not limited to Bloomington. The break dancing crew competes all over the United States.

Competitions, or “battles” as they are called in the breaking world, consist of 16 teams or crews with four rounds of dance battles.

Battles usually last from mid-afternoon to the early morning. Between the rounds, the crews stand in a circle and start cyphering.

“(Cyphering is when breakers) take turns just going out in the middle of the circle showing what they’ve got, basically. You know: dancing, grooving, booty-shaking,” Wolverton said. “The final round is huge and everybody watches.”

Break dancing is a free-style, create-your-own-moves dance. There are different types of this less-controlled style of dancing that a b-boy (male break dancer) or b-girl (female break dancer) can specialize in, such as tops, or dancing on one’s feet; footwork, a variation of groundwork and tops; freeze, holding a position, and power-moves, such as flairs, handstands and windmills. Aerial moves can be thrown in the mix of all the popping, locking and dropping.

Wolverton’s passion for break dancing goes beyond being the president of the club to influencing potential breakers.

“Justin inspired me. He gave me the idea (to join the break dancing club), and it was more fun than I expected, so I decided to stay with it,” freshman Anthony “Skeeter” Long said. “I’ve had to learn that there really are no rules. You can’t be like ‘how do you do this? How do you do this?’ You kind of have to just do stuff, and if it looks good, it works.”

So why do the b-boys and b-girls break-dance?

“It’s like its own culture. It has a substance and a history,” junior Clinton Parker said. “Because it’s a free-style dance, it’s something I can control completely. I make the moves up as I go, and nobody can really tell me if it’s wrong or right or good or bad because it’s the way I dance.”

Wolverton and the club’s passion for break dancing led to the group’s largest call-out meeting. Wolverton’s belief is that every person who is new to break dancing will begin to understand what it truly is.

“Most people don’t exactly know what real breaking is,” Wolverton said. “They think it’s all tricks and moves, but it’s a lot deeper than that.”