One of the most insightful stories we’ve heard is how the early generation of Long Beach-based bboys would write down their moves and concepts in notebooks during the 1980s. Remember, back then, they didn’t have easy access to digital video cameras or web cams. It was hard to record your moves and easily play them back for research purposes. Today, it’s the opposite. There are endless videos online of young bboys, poppers, lockers and other street dancers practicing in their bedrooms and garages. The motives behind these videos can range from self-promotion to a request for peer critiques. But wouldn’t it be fascinating to recover some of these notebooks from the 1980s and study them?
By going back in the past, we wouldn’t be copying what our predecessors did. The goal would be to learn how they approached obstacles in their dance and then creatively solved the problem. We’re looking for how their brains work, what guided their thought processes, and the context of their discoveries at the time. Nowadays, it’s easy for a beginner bboy to focus on moves and work towards cleanly executing a windmill or an air chair freeze. But what about the approach behind the move? How do you get into it and out of it? What parts of the song do you want to accentuate with certain movements?
That’s where the notebooks come in. They also serve as historical documents that tell the story of our predecessors in ways that still photos and videos can’t. Remember how you used to make time capsules when you were a kid? Some day in the future, another lucky kid would find your capsule and marvel at the toys, books, and trinkets that you put into it. These notebooks from the old school bboys are like our time capsule. Their stories are preserved through the thoughts, musings, mistakes, and accidental discoveries that are recorded in these pages. It makes you think about what would happen if we recorded our dance discoveries and preserved them for the future bboys and bgirls to come.
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