Marginal thirty years ago, breakdance is gaining in popularity. Increasingly taught in dance schools, the discipline is now the subject of several major competitions and television programs and will even make its grand entrance into the Olympic family at the Paris Olympics in 2024.
Fearing that we will forget the very essence of this art born in the street, Quebec dancer Léo Caron has made a documentary, Decypher, which looks back at the New York origins of the station wagon and its establishment in Montreal. Interview.
“I had wanted to explore the story of my own passion for a long time, which I have been practicing since I was 7 years old. I had heard snippets of stories, seen videos here and there, but there is no production that brings it all together, it’s very poorly documented,” says Léo Caron, 27, who goes by the name dancer name Bboy Flail.
Four years ago, when his daily life began to slow down due to an injury, he jumped at the chance to start his research and launch his documentary project with the help of his friend Adrian Colina on camera.
“People recognize certain movements on the ground, freezes, these almost acrobatic breaks, but they don’t know the story behind it. I really wanted to give the floor to the break pioneers here in Montreal, to pay homage to them,” he explains.
In the early 1980s
In his fifty-minute documentary, he goes back to the early 1980s, when breakdance took hold in the metropolis.
At the time, we were far from television sets and large performance halls. The break was practiced in the streets, the basements of apartments, the subway or the clubs underground. “It was an art before being a sport. The dancers had this common passion where they sought above all originality rather than perfection of movement. […] There was also a very strong aspect of sharing and community. It was a whole culture, the break, it came with a style of music, a style of dress too. Cap on the side, wide pants, Adidas shoes. »
In all, Léo Caron held out the microphone to some thirty dancers, who in addition to telling their story sent him unpublished archive footage. “I must have watched more than 80 hours of videos recorded on VHS tapes from the era, which a dancer friend helped me digitize,” says the director.
With his documentary, he wants to introduce newcomers to the culture of station wagons and encourage insiders not to forget where their passion comes from. “The popularization of the station wagon — with a more commercial, more selling aspect — has distorted it a bit. But you have to see the positive, it makes the practice more accessible, better known. It gets people interested in it and trying it out. »