As Pauline Arrighi demonstrated this on our site last month, The question of Australia's breakdancing performance is a symptom of a deep-seated problem. It is that too little emphasis has been placed on a particular element that occurred during the Olympic Games in Paris. On this occasion, for the first time since the 2018 Youth Olympic Games, a breakdancing event took place, simultaneously celebrating the athletes of a little-publicized but very impressive discipline and the youthful nature of the Parisian event. Let's not kid ourselves: the choice promoted by the IOC on this occasion is eminently political. Breakdancing is a dance style popularized in the 70s in the USA by African-American dancers, and its Olympic consecration seems to open the universal space of the world of sport to a practice that was once communal. Olympism, this cheap universalism, presents itself as a "breaker of cultural barriers". This could have worked, but it was without counting on the strength of the community spirit: the story of a rout.

Breakdancing, first of all, is closely linked to an innovative musical practice that consisted of DJs exciting an audience by creating rhythmic breaks in the middle of certain pieces of music: they repeat the same passage by putting their hands on one of their two record players and "breaking" the original melody with a rhythmic "scratch" which then becomes an improvised "break" by a "B-Boy". This new musicality of the American suburbs will lead to the appearance of new dances intended to channel the excitement linked to the "tease" caused by the "breaks": standing movements, figures on the ground on three or six beats make their appearance in the communities of "breakers". Rivalries between troupes accompany the clashes between rival gangs, and we find traces of championships organized in the USA as in Europe, giving birth to the nation of "crew", both "gang" but also "troop" of dance. The whole activity being established on the confrontation and the challenge between troops from which systematically emerges a winner prescribes the discipline to integrate the sporting dynamic. The community character is dissolved at first by the Olympics, dedicating a journey from the ghettos of New York to the glorious plateaus of Parisian gymnasiums. Confrontation, duel, consecration of victory, training, athletic mastery of space. Everything is combined. To which is added a legendary, community history, really in tune with the times. As the greatest Australian specialist on the subject, Rachael Gunn, says very well, it is at the same time:

“A dance, a sport, a community, a culture, a lifestyle.” 

This is because Australia has been able to promote the discipline at a level other than the Olympics, a level at which it was not expected: the university level. And, it has been able to combine sporting and intellectual performance by presenting at the games an intellectual who lives and thinks about her practice more than anyone else. Let us pause for a moment on the personality of "Raygunn", this dancer that everyone knows today for having made a fool of herself in the eyes of the whole world: the Australian sportswoman, whose bitter failure earned her a zero point on the day of the event, is a researcher, lecturer at Macquarie University after obtaining a doctorate in what we would call in France "gender studies". within the same University that employs him. A linear path, alas, for many researchers today who, not passing the competitive examinations, go directly from the benches of the university where they do little; to the chairs, where they do less… In an interview given to the Sydney Morning Herald, she explains very ingenuously having discovered the discipline thanks to her boyfriend, now her husband, but also her coach and trainer. This discovery, rich in new lessons, was for her the opportunity to develop a form of research that was at the same time practical and speculative, centered on what she seems to know best, namely herself. Looking through her CV, we discover, for example, that she published an article entitled The Australian breaking scene and the Olympic Games: the possibilities and politics of sportification (Gunn, R. & Marie, L., Jun 2023, In: Global Hip Hop Studies. 4, 1, p. 39-56 18 p.) which begins as follows:

In this article, we analyse the impact of the inclusion of breaking in the Olympic Games on the Australian breaking scene. We draw on our experiences as Australian breaking practitioners, as well as ethnographic research conducted between 2018 and 2021, to show how Australian breakers responded to and interpreted the inclusion of breaking as an Olympic sport. 

We thus learn that it is possible to feed one's academic CV, this sesame to a career, with publications whose sole object is one's own participatory observation of the event of which one is the protagonist. This is unimportant, and I will not return to the failure of the dancer sanctioned by social networks. On the other hand, I would like to focus on the nature of her representation.

The Australian champion's performance is above all based on a rewriting of the rules of the discipline: she wanted to "represent" her Australian "crew" in her scenography by opposing in particular to the academic figures of the Frenchwoman she was facing forms of mime: the kangaroo step or the figure of the walibi. The most astonishing thing is that the figures she chose, which were inspired by her husband, do not draw their source from Australian "culture", but from "nature". This is a contradiction in the context of the "pop" culture of the "breakers" whose entire imagination is linked precisely to the ghettos and the first duels between gangs. And what is most disconcerting in Rachael Gunn's proposal is above all the arrogance of her attitude, which consists of wanting to give breakdance lessons to the whole world, and wanting to make her passage a form of practical application of certain sociological theories that she developed alone in her academic corner. Indeed, in the series of movements that she applies herself to reproducing, in her desire to "mimic" animals, we find the trace of a desire to "Australianize" the discipline. And that's where it all comes down to! 

She already theorized her desire to reform the discipline in a 2012 article entitled "Rearticulating Gender Norms through Breakdancing." In it, she described her own critique of the gender stereotypes that she believes the discipline carries: 

This article argues, however, that breakdancing attempts to transcend cultural regulations that limit bodies. In breakdancing, men participate in a typically feminine activity—dancing—and women adopt a 'masculine' way of moving. Yet, in the process, hyper-masculine/feminine expressions are reinforced. Paradoxically, breakdancing both enables and hinders the rearticulation of gender norms.

In another article from 2016, she also announced her project to link theory (of gender) and practice: "My practical action as a b-girl therefore deploys a new methodology to both negotiate the gendered presuppositions of the scene and identify possible lines of social transformation."¹"

From this stems the series of humiliations suffered by the researcher who was publicly banished from the community to which she claimed to belong, and which rejected her virulently. This public banishment - whose hateful forms are obviously condemnable - went as far as accusations of "cultural appropriation". 

The "breaker community" turned inward on this occasion to condemn the provocations of the "white researcher". Many dance "purists", who saw the Olympics as a form of "theft" of something that belonged to them, rushed into the breach. Thus, an Australian model - Succubus Mami - denounced the thing in such striking terms that it was taken up in the American and Australian women's media (ELLE et marieclaire): “I support women in sport, but I don’t agree with a white, middle-class woman with crocodile tears making breaking her whole identity – when it was absolutely not meant for her. She has so many ways to express herself as a white woman, and yet she chooses breaking? And in fact her whole identity? It’s embarrassing. She’s from Australia by the way, and what she does is very much an Australian attitude…”

It is not made "for her". That is to say, she is "white", and "break" is not for "people like that". The accusation, often cited and repeated, is of an unheard-of violence: certainly Raygunn's athletic performance is bad, was worthless. But, invalidating her presence on the pretext that she is "white" is a racist, communal postulate that irrevocably closes the Olympic mirage. The community withdrawal triggered by the choreography of the gender researcher who thought she could think and live an athletic discipline is in reality the symbol of the failure of Universalism in the inclusive society as the neo-progressives desire it. We must therefore be grateful to the Australian researcher: at the same time as she staged the flagrant disconnection between the sociology of gender and the reality on the ground, she helped to reveal the racist malaise that underlies the accusation of cultural appropriation.