Foundation

Based on interviews with many of the dance's most significant figures as well as on four years of on-the-ground research in New York City, Foundation: B-boys, B-girls and Hip-Hop Culture in New York offers the first serious study of b-boying--commonly known as "breakdancing"--the pre-eminent form of hip-hop dance. While breakdancing is often dismissed as a fad that died in the eighties, Joseph Schloss explains that the dance's true form--known as b-boying--lives on in underground venues around the globe. This almost four-decade-old dance of the African Diaspora boasts a complex set of aesthetic principles, a fiercely competitive attitude, a unique and powerful musical repertoire, and a profound sense of its own history. Schloss, who learned to b-boy as part of the research for this book, presents an inside look at a dance that counts seventies gang culture, African religious tradition, professional gymnastics, and Black vaudeville among its major influences. Featuring chapters on music, pedagogy, aesthetics, space, battling, and history, Foundation explores a dance form that is at once aggressive and spiritual, raw and sophisticated, viscerally exciting and deeply introspective.