Breakdancing in Paris Olympics has some heads spinning

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PARIS — The neighborhood near the top of Montmartre has what Arnaud Deprez calls “‘Amelie’ vibes,” as in the 2001 movie filmed around the hill’s cobblestone lanes where tourists linger in outdoor cafes and artists paint on sidewalk easels. With piercing eyes and tattooed hands, Deprez, a break dancer known as B-boy Fenix, decidedly does not have Amelie vibes.

His regular street show bursts into the afternoon with thumps of hip-hop from his portable speaker and flashes of flying arms and churning legs as he spins on the ground and twists in the air. People gather to watch from the stone staircase leading to the Basilique du Sacré Coeur. They clap. They cheer. They stomp. They drop coins in a hat placed nearby. Sometimes they pull out credit cards because Fenix, and his street show dance partner, B-boy Tournesol, have a device to run those, too.

Then the police arrive, because for as popular as Fenix and Tournesol are, they don’t have the street performer permits required to trample on Montmartre’s Amelie vibes. The officers make Fenix turn off the speaker and pick up the hat and the credit card machine. They tell the dancers to leave even though Fenix senses that many of the officers feel badly about doing this. Each time, he walks away, lingers for about an hour in a nearby cafe and then lugs his speaker back to the bottom of the basilica’s steps.

He calls this routine “Dancing with the police.”

One year from now, Paris will host a Summer Olympics designed to celebrate the multicultural city with an opening parade down the Seine River, beach volleyball under the Eiffel Tower and the introduction of a new Olympic sport, one pushed hard by local organizers: break dancing. Paris Olympic officials and the International Olympic Committee are so enthused about the addition of break dancing — or “breaking,” as the competitive form is known — it’s a featured part of the Games’ promotion.

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But France’s sudden embrace feels like a mixed message to break dancers here, many of whom come from Paris’s African and Arab suburbs and whose art often is caught amid festering tensions such as those that led to recent protests after the police shooting of an unarmed teenager. And in a country where artists get subsidies for their work, break dancing’s acceptance as part of an athletic event makes little sense to them.

Fenix leans against a concrete wall and looks down from Montmartre at the city center sprawled out below. He can see the famous Place de la Concorde, where the Olympic breaking competition will be held. At 32, he doesn’t need to perform in the streets; he’s an accomplished dancer and artist who has worked in Paris’s theaters and helped choreograph high-end commercials. On Montmartre, though, he can dance to his own music, make his own rules and live his own vision. On Montmartre, he is free.

“For some people, [break dancing] is a fully Black culture from the ghetto, so … they don’t want to hear about it,” Fenix says. “They don’t like the culture of breaking and hip-hop because it’s very connected to rap culture, is very connected to Black culture. It’s very connected to immigration.”

Break dancing has been searching for acceptance since emerging a half-century ago from the Black and Latino neighborhoods of New York’s South Bronx. Young artists in forgotten city blocks mixed dance moves with kicks from Kung Fu movies in a way that was new and dramatic. The dancers formed crews and challenged each other in elaborate showdowns. From this grew the roots of hip-hop and rap.

By the mid-1980s, break dancing had spread across the United States and eventually to Europe, particularly France, where hip-hop appealed especially to immigrants coming from Tunisia, Algeria and other African countries.

Immigrants such as Junior Bosila Banya, known as B-boy Junior, who contracted polio at age three in the Democratic Republic of Congo, damaging the nerves in one of his legs and leaving him with an exaggerated limp. When he was five, his mother sent him to live with his father in a small French town three hours from Paris, believing he would get better medical care, yet knowing he likely would never return.

Unable to play soccer like his peers, Junior discovered break dancing as a young teenager. Suddenly, he had ways to move that he had never imagined. He built up his arms and was able to hold his body in outrageous positions. Break dancing became what he calls his “tragic shell,” a place to hide the pain and tell his long, sad journey. At times, his dances were hard; at others, soft. Sometimes they were angry; sometimes, happy. They were his escape.

“Dancing was my way to get the revenge for the polio,” he says.

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There were others, such as Nacera Guerra (B-girl Hurricane), the daughter of Algerian immigrants, who grew up in a small French town before moving to Paris’s suburbs, where she became one of the country’s first female break dancers. In her early 20s, she would take the Metro to the subterranean shopping mall at Les Halles, where other young break dancers practiced on the smooth tile floor in the entryway of a swimming pool attached to the mall.

The practices weren’t organized; the rules were few. Everyone seemed to know instinctively when to show up, where to go and who would bring the boombox. Hurricane was the only girl. She loved the edge this gave her, the power of being the lone female dancing among the boys. She became known as “a rebel girl,” tough, refusing to be intimidated. As a young Muslim woman, she says, “dancing was not really a good thing [for] a girl from a ‘good family.’ ” Everything was a fight. That fight became her dance.

“It was just an expression,” she says. “We just want to feel it. We just want to meet each other. We want to challenge each other, [to be] competitive [and to] inspire, just bring this art to a different level.”

They had all watched groundbreaking hip-hop movies such as “Beat Street” and “Wild Style,” and living in the then-burgeoning immigrant neighborhoods around Paris that were increasingly the target of French nationalists, they were in the open yet very much underground. Their music was alive, their moves electric, but they could tell that many of their neighbors were trying hard to look away.

Over time, France’s break dancers developed a style of their own — one that was sassy and bold and beautiful and arrogant, filled with bravado and trash talk. A style that mixed the charm of Paris with the power of the area’s rising immigrant neighborhoods.

“We had a special flavor,” Junior says. “It was a fire, something that you could not control.”

“It was very ‘What’s your problem?’ ” Fenix says.

Then in the early 2000s, Paris’s perceptions of break dancing started to turn. Junior says an important step came when the small, indoor theater at Parc de la Villette began to include break dancing shows. Finally, the dancers had their own onstage performances, with paid crowds as well as professional lighting and choreography. For the first time, they felt appreciated.

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By then, formal competitions were taking over. Break dancing was a little less about voice and expression and a little more about trophies and checks. Battles moved off sidewalks and onto stages. Junior and his crew started winning some of the country’s larger events. In 2007, he was a contestant on the TV show “France Has Got Unbelievable Talent” and won the first prize of 150,000 euros. He went home and saw his mother again. Even now, 16 years after the show, people recognize him, shaking his hand in restaurants or on the Metro.

Most of today’s break dancing is done for competitions with new dancers coming from places such as China, Japan and Australia. Junior, who dances in theater productions these days, is sponsored by Red Bull, which also backs many of the biggest events. Last year’s Red Bull BC One World Final sold out New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom and was broadcast on ESPN. The same event this fall will be held at Roland Garros as a lead-up to the Olympics.

In easternmost Paris are the grounds of France’s National Institute of Sport, Expertise and Performance, essentially the country’s Olympic and Paralympic training center with a soaring field house, soccer fields, weight rooms and headquarters buildings for most traditional summer Olympic sports. Among these facilities, on the first floor of a red brick building, a paper sign hangs on a white door. It reads, “Breaking.”

This is the home of France’s newest national team.

“Team” is a loose description because competitive breaking is an individual discipline — the Olympics will have 16 spots each for dancers in men’s and women’s divisions, leaving little room for more than a couple dancers from one country. But because France, as the host, automatically gets a spot in each division, there seems a need to have at least some kind of a team.

The French breaking team’s training center mostly consists of a dance studio with a smooth concrete floor, two white walls, a wall of windows and a wall of mirrors. The team’s “coach,” B-boy Chakal, is a break dancer from Algeria who moved to the French city of Bordeaux years ago to have better opportunities at dancing. Chakal says he would like to paint the walls someday and add drums and maybe a DJ. But graffiti doesn’t match the athletic ethos, so the floors and ceilings remain white.

“It’s a sports place,” Chakal says. “Me, I’m an artist.”

Most of the French team’s dancers are in their 20s and 30s and have grown up in the contest world. As a dancer from the 1990s, Chakal longs for when break dancing was built around crews, with each member playing a different role in battles. One dancer might best interpret the music, while another has the most power and another the best style. One-on-one competitions, which is what the Olympics will be, have taken away this variety.

Chakal would like to see full crews at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, though he realizes this may be fantasy. With breaking scheduled only for Paris 2024, next summer might be its lone Olympic competition. So, he focuses on the opportunity he has now.

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“The game has changed, and everybody understand Olympic is good for new generation,” he says.

He is sitting in the training center’s two-story cafeteria, surrounded by what appear to be giant track and field athletes in French warm-up suits. He looks around at the long tables and huge piles of food.

“I don’t believe this one day in my life,” Chakal says. “I go to training for myself and the government give me money for this? You know, this is like a dream.”

Breaking competitions are everywhere in France these days.

“You will see we are a country that is very organized,” Fenix says. “Every Saturday, every Sunday there [are] one to three battles. It’s insane.”

Many are sponsored by local governments, held in parks or theaters. Supported by the establishment but also controlled. Junior knows of a suburban official who boasts of being “the hip-hop mayor.” But in the world of contests, where battles are done by individual dancers from around the planet, something is lost.

“They don’t take time to create [who] they are, where they are from, to get inspired,” Junior says of today’s break dancers. “They see straight what happens in Japan; they see straight what happens in U.S. So we’re losing a sense — a little bit — of each country, and now, I cannot say there is a Paris style.”

As Hurricane sits in an outdoor cafe next to Les Halles, she worries about the Olympics. She hates the way breaking got into the Paris Games, not as a grass-roots movement to celebrate an art form from the city’s marginalized communities but rather as a calculated bet by the World DanceSport Federation, whose leaders wanted into the Olympics and realized the International Olympic Committee — eager to appeal to younger audiences — would not choose a more traditional form such as ballroom dancing or salsa.

“We were included by accident,” she says.

She laments that many Olympic officials want to embrace an image but not the culture that goes with breaking. She says many of those in Paris’s art establishment who are enthusiastic about breaking are the same ones who have refused to let break dancers perform on their stages, telling her: “No, you can only dance in front of the theater” instead of inside it.

“We are a subculture for them,” she says.

“I don’t know if the Olympics is good or bad news for us,” she continues. “If it’s about breaking only, I’m not sure they’re going to bring the [hip-hop] culture behind it.”

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Hurricane stops and gazes toward the mall, which has been rebuilt and filled with expensive boutiques. A cinema surrounds the pool’s entryway. Nobody break dances here anymore, and that seems to discourage her. Much like Fenix, who chooses to do street shows to articulate his art, she hates seeing the free and open part of break dancing wither. Whenever she brings a visitor to the Les Halles, she takes them to a hip-hop museum located not far from the mall’s entrance.

She wonders if Paris 2024 will make places like the museum a part of its Games.

The next evening, she hosts a workshop at a rec center in Department 93, a rapidly gentrifying area with a large immigrant population just northeast of the city. The workshop is a throwback to another time. Steffan “Mr. Wiggles” Clemente, one of the original break dancers from the 1970s South Bronx, is the guest teacher. Mr. Wiggles, who has been traveling around Europe on a tour, has drawn about 50 break dancers in their teens and 20s, some who have been dancing for years. Most say they are there because they want to learn how to win competitions.

For nearly two hours, Mr. Wiggles shows the group basic moves: sliding, spinning, jerking to a stop and sliding his fingers across the flat bill of his red New York Yankees cap. Through a voice as coarse as crushed stone, he tells how break dancing came from graffiti artists who used dance to bring to life the things they wrote on walls.

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“They don’t give [graffiti] writers their shout-out” in hip-hop history, Mr. Wiggles says. Then he tells them about “the burned-out buildings” of his childhood neighborhood and how, as hip-hop evolved, the break dancers “didn’t get the props and pay like the MCs and the rappers.”

In one sense, he seems to like the fact that break dancers are finally getting paid for their art. But in another, it’s hard for him to fully embrace what break dancing has become.

“These are not battles; they’re exhibitions,” he says, standing in the rec center’s parking lot after the workshop. “Battles were in the streets with no referee stepping in. The [stuff] they’re doing today, it’s great. But just call them exhibitions.”

As Mr. Wiggles heads toward a waiting car, he turns back and says: “You know who [is dancing] outside now? The TikTokers. I keep saying to the B-boys, ‘You need to go outside.’”

When he was younger, Fenix says, “All I wanted to do was battle, battle, battle.”

But so many things can be said through break dancing that get lost in the heat of a contest. Fenix needed a different way to speak. The Coronavirus lockdowns in 2020 were especially tough; the museums and theaters were closed. Culture was shuttered. Montmartre, however, was open, and Fenix came each day when it wasn’t raining, set up his speaker and did his show for an audience that had few other entertainment options. He called his place “The Theater of the Curfew.”

But when Paris reopened, later that year, the police were back.

On July 14 that year, Bastille Day, the police had just closed down Fenix and Tournesol’s show when Fenix spotted French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte, walking with a small security detail. He and Tournesol ran into the street near Macron, and with an old theater tune from the Belgian singer Jacques Brel spilling from their portable speaker, Fenix began to dance. He dropped to the ground and did a handstand, then started spinning on his head while wiggling his feet back and forth.

The Macrons stopped. They watched Fenix dance and clapped when he was done. Emmanuel Macron gave a thumbs up. Fenix raced up to the president and hastily told him about the Theater of the Curfew and the Amelie vibes and how the police chase him away. Macron asked Fenix for his contact information, and Fenix dashed into a nearby store for a pen and paper. A few days later, a letter arrived from Macron’s deputy chief of staff.

“Believe that the head of state understands the difficulties that are yours to perform in the streets of Paris and knows all the frustration this can cause,” the letter read in French, adding that Macron’s office had informed the leader of city’s police department about Fenix’s plight.

Fenix started showing the letter to officers who arrived to stop his show. For a few weeks they let him continue.

Break dancing, he says, is a positive thing and he believes the government someday will appreciate his street show the way it has embraced breaking for the Games. “I know in my bones: With time, I will get that permit,” he says.

But as the months went by, tolerance waned in this city of art, and the police resumed chasing away Fenix and his partner.

As their countrymen train for spots in the Olympics, they remain performers without permission, and even the empathy of France’s president couldn’t unseat the preeminence of Montmartre’s Amelie vibes.

Design and development by Yutao Chen. Illustrations by Ben Tallon. Design editing by Virginia Singarayar. Additional design editing by Joe Moore. Story editing by Matthew Rennie. Videography by James Cornsilk. Video editing by Luis Velarde and Jayne Orenstein. Photo editing by Toni Sandys. Copy editing by Mark Bradley.