A B-boy breaks into Ivory Tower

JULIA TIERNAN/YH Louis Cancelmi, SY '00, doing a headspin move.

It's 3 p.m. on a Tuesday. In WLH, sections are in full swing. In Commons, guys in green shirts are cleaning up three and a half hours worth of lunch mess. In Berkeley, hardhats are channeling rivers of gravel through big Day-Glo tubes. And, in an aerobics practice room on the fifth floor of Payne Whitney, Louis Cancelmi, SY '00, is spinning around on his head.

Cancelmi, a major force of campus theater (his play Firedown Call went up two weeks ago in Nick Chapel), is also the founder, leader, and spiritual force behind the Yale B-boy Society, and 3 p.m. falls in the middle of his practice time. Sometimes, other members of the B-boy Society are there with him; but, as he admits, this year he's had to mostly practice alone. So, three times a week, he comes to this cavernous, flickeringly-lit room all alone, stays for an hour and a half, and kicks the funk out like it's 1985.

Today, he's accompanied by the unfunkiest of possible guests--he's invited me and a photographer to come and watch, ask as many questions as we want about what he does, and snap a few pictures. B-boyin', or "breakdancing," as I'd always heard it called, has recently been enjoying something of a nationwide renaissance. And I've heard people talking about Cancelmi's skills ever since he demonstrated the art of B-boyin' in front of TD Master Robert Thompson's New York Mambo class. So I'm psyched to learn what all the buzz is about, and psyched to see this guy in action.

COURTESY CANTZ PUBLISHERS Keith Haring B-boy painting detail

I start in with the questions as soon as he takes off his sweat-shirt and starts his stretching routine. "So when exactly did you take up breakdancing?" I start to ask, but he quickly cuts me off. "It's called B-boy-in'," he points out. "B-hyphen-b-o-y-i-n. Break-dancing is the media term for it. Nobody who'd do it now would call it that, except for people who don't know what they're talking about. It was called B-boyin' by the people who started it, and it's always been called B-boyin'."

I rephrase, and he tells me his story. He started when he was a high school senior in a neighborhood outside of Seattle. There was a group of guys at his high school who practiced B-boyin', and he joined after his younger brother, who turned out to be a hip-hop prodigy, became one of them. I ask him if he ever got to be as good as his brother. He smiles, and turns his eyes to the floor. "No."

At this point, he's stretching a bit more acrobatically--he's on his stomach, with his upper body curving upward, snakelike, to face me, and his right hand gripping his right ankle. He describes the philosophy of the kids who taught the moves to the Cancelmi brothers. "They made an effort to not only teach the dancing, but to impart the history. Their motto was: `respect and unity toward hip-hop.'"

He's now sitting upright, one leg behind him, as he begins to tell me the aspects of hip-hop that he knows and respects: the four facets of hip-hop culture (MC-ing, DJ-ing, B-boyin', and graffiti art), and how they evolved in the late '70s/early '80s in Los Angeles and New York.

A little research after our conversation shows that he knows just as much, if not more, than the people who write the books. B-boy moves go all the way back to African dances and have been written about in Dickens' notes on America and preserved in one of Thomas Edison's fin-de-siècle kinescope films. Although he doesn't go into all of this, I'm certain he's aware of it; Cancelmi is obviously a Guy-Who-Knows-His-Shit. He's a student of his art as well as a practitioner. "The backspin evolved," he tells me. "It's a link to another move, and another move before that."

The stretching's now pretty much over with, and Cancelmi springs to his feet and presses the play button of the boombox he's brought with him. Something called "Short Cut vs. the Cut Chemist" bomps out of the speakers--"turntablist music," he explains. "The music is totally integral. The moves have to be connected to music. You can feel a kind of tension if they don't go together." And then he breaks into his moves.

He begins by bouncing lightly, almost weightlessly, on the balls of his Adidas-clad feet, the B-boy uprock move; he resembles a boxer, a quick Ali-type, scoping out his opponent just as the first round starts. Then, suddenly, he's down on one hand, standing upside-down, a one-handed handstand, with his entire body resting on the strength of his right arm, and his left hand reaching out and pulling his right ankle behind his head. He holds the position for a split second (a B-boy freeze), and then he's got his other arm down on the ground--but his feet do not follow. He's suspended, his body parallel to the hardwood floor, in a move he refers to later as "The Cricket," doing pushups with no feet, hopping around on his hands without any other part of his body touching the ground. I'm amazed at the amount of arm strength this has got to require. And then he's up, bouncing again, and breathing heavily, and he comes to a stop and sits down again. He wipes his brow, smiles. "Whoo! I need a rest," he says.

I'm struck near-dumb, but I manage to get out my next question, which I have to ask: How do you feel when you do that?

"I feel good, I feel light," he says. "I don't really think, I just listen to the music. It's just fun."

Yeah, but what's it like? I mean, do you feel different, invincible, or something like that?

"If you're B-boyin', a certain personality enters into you--a big part of it is the demeanor you present, how you communicate with everyone who's with you. And the personality depends on the situation. If you're just in a loose, fun circle, you're just having fun. But if someone shows they're confronting you, it becomes confrontational, more of a one-upmanship type of thing."

Then he's back up on his feet again, bouncing around.

"The most important thing is the way you do a move--adding something to it that makes it your own," Cancelmi maintains. "You get respect for creativeness. And everybody has their own style. Some guys have a really foolish style." He demonstrates this type of style, bouncing clownishly, his arms swinging loosely from his shoulders. "And some take themselves really seriously."

I ask him how he would characterize his own style. He thinks about it for a minute, still moving his feet, but can't come up with an answer. "I'll have to get back to you on that one."

And, as if he were dodging the question, he hits the floor again, promising to show me "power moves," the more acrobatic moves. He tells me that he's seen guys do "windmills" in which they take their caps off and pass them between their legs, or take their shoes off while they're doing them.

I have no clue what a windmill is. "You'll know one when you see one," he assures me, and plants his right hand on the ground. And, just as quickly as he's done everything else, he's spinning his body in midair, intermittently planting a hand or heel to fend off gravity for a few more seconds. He keeps it up for awhile, and then he stops and does a handstand, where he pauses for a few moments (another freeze) to catch his balance. He lowers his head to the ground and begins to swivel his lower body, now up in the air. I figure out what he's doing: he's building up momentum for the ultimate B-boy move, the headspin. Finally, he gets enough and takes his hands off the ground, and he's doing it, he's spinning on the top of his head, and then he crashes to the ground.

"That's one of the less safe moves," he says, and smiles.

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