Dr. Rachael Gunn Aside, Is Breakdancing a Sport or an Art?

Doesn't making arts into Olympic events stifle aesthetic progress?

You’ve probably seen video of the middle aged Australian white lady academic, Rachael Gunn, lumpily attempting to breakdance in the Olympics.

If only she also were a PretendAbo claiming to be the first Aboriginal with a Ph.D. in Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies due to some Elizabeth Warren-sized smidgen of Aboriginal ancestry, she’d be a frontrunner for the SteveSailer.Net Person of the Year award for individuals who do their damndest to generate content for this Substack.

The Powers That Be have since largely memoryholed the video of Dr. Gunn breakdancing in the Olympic. Here’s one that’s chopped up enough to have survived the purge so far, but who knows how long any video will last:

Here’s Dr. Gunn’s auto-ethnographic Ph.D. dissertation:

Deterritorializing gender in Sydney's breakdancing scene: a B-girl's experience of B-boying

This thesis critically interrogates how masculinist practices of breakdancing offers a site for the transgression of gendered norms. Drawing on my own experiences as a female within the male-dominated breakdancing scene in Sydney, first as a spectator, then as an active crew member, this thesis questions why so few female participants engage in this creative space, and how breakdancing might be the space to displace and deterritorialise gender. I use analytic autoetthnography [sic] and interviews with scene members in collaboration with theoretical frameworks offered by Deleuze and Guttari, Butler, Bourdieu and other feminist and post-structuralist philosophers, to critically examine how the capacities of bodies are constituted and shaped in Sydney's breakdancing scene, and to also locate the potentiality for moments of transgression. In other words, I conceptualize the breaking body as not a 'body' constituted through regulations and assumptions, but as an assemblage open to new rhizomatic connections. Breaking is a space that embraces difference, whereby the rituals of the dance not only augment its capacity to deterritorialize the body, but also facilitate new possibilities for performativities beyond the confines of dominant modes of thought and normative gender construction. Consequently, this thesis attempts to contribute to what I perceive as a significant gap in scholarship on hip-hop, breakdancing, and autoethnographic explorations of Deleuze-Guattarian theory.

Breakdancing, or as they call it at the Olympics “breaking” as if it were a sport rather than a dance (the Olympics has resisted for generations the pleas of the large ballroom dancing community for ballroom to be an Olympic sport), is of course a highly masculine form of dance in which two males attempt to intimidate each other in front of a crowd of fellow juvenile delinquents.

Crémieux endorses break dancing in the Olympics:

It's sad Olympic Breakdancing won't show up again in 2028, because it was really the most fun event to watch by a huge margin. Competitors were highly athletic, clearly having fun, and I didn't see any other sport that had as much joyful mocking and expressiveness. Just watch:

You can watch it here on Youtube, but you can’t watch it within Substack. In contrast to the Rachael Gunn fiasco, the men’s final isn’t being memoryholed (NBC wants you to watch it — it’s good), it’s just being restricted for contractual reasons, kind of like when I paywall all or part of my Substack posts.

Is breakdancing better off as a sport or an art? To make a sport out of a dance, you need to impose a lot of rules to make it a fair fight, but rule-breaking is how an art progresses aesthetically.

Back in the 1980s, British skaters Torvill & Dean, with help from musical theater legend Michael Crawford (the star of Phantom of the Opera), were turning Olympic Ice Dancing into an exciting branch of the art of dance.

I can recall looking forward to seeing the next aesthetic breakthrough that Torvill & Dean would unleash.

But in the 1990s that kind of artistic innovation got shut down by the sports' authorities to make judging more objective.

Indeed, there's been a general trend in figure skating and gymnastics to make them more objective sports than subjective arts, which is why the US now does so well. We still can't match the Eastern Europeans, with their Bolshoi Ballet tradition, in artistry, but now sheer artistic magic counts for less than it used to.