In an Instagram video posted by Breaking48, a child can be found practicing his breakdancing in Palestine whilst another child peers from behind a barely-standing building, a small smile etched on both their tender faces. The breakdancing boy flows into each move with ease. He is light on his feet, shuffling side steps and arm swings into a toprock before collapsing to his hands and shuffling six steps clockwise in a downrock, his legs drawing in and out from his body as he drills each buoyant move with an excited flare. Despite the rubble surrounding him and a drone buzzing overhead – each rhythmic step overpowered by the hum of impending danger – the boy is at peace. For a brief moment, he dances passionately and is left to live the life of an everyday child. For many children in Gaza, breakdancing has become their refuge amid a war zone they call home. Yet, their desire for respite is not far off from the street dance’s radical beginnings.
In 1970, the Bronx was on the brink of total collapse. Burned buildings lay crumbled across scorched lots and abandoned homes with shattered windows and walls blotched with mold sagged like rotting flesh on a deteriorating body. Entire city blocks were reduced to rubble and neighborhoods decayed like a desolate wasteland – hauntingly apocalyptic and not far off from Gaza today. Yet, while Gaza’s destruction is owed to external forces, the Israeli military, the state of the Bronx in the 70s was the result of disinvestment, redlining, and local government neglect. Businesses shut down and widespread unemployment ravaged entire families. Poverty, crime, and an overwhelming sense of fear clouded the once thriving New York neighborhood. Of the more than 1000 murders that took place that year in New York, a grim 30% hike in the previous year’s rate, nearly 300 were in the Bronx alone. It was dystopian, a scarred borough plagued by systemic neglect while ten miles south Manhattan boomed with urban renewal.
“Just imagine World War II, bombed out Berlin,” said historian Joe Conzo in the 2018 documentary, Street Justice: The Bronx. “[the Bronx] was just a war zone.”
That dismal reality became a legend of its own. There’s a scene from the 1979 film The Warriors where gang leader Cyrus is speaking to a passionate crowd about gang unity on the streets of a fictional Coney Island. He is robed. They look up in praise. In a way, it is religious.
“Can you dig it,” he bellows. “I say the future is ours!”
A cheer erupts and electrifies the air. It is joyous, yet underneath it all lies the whistle of a screaming gun. Then, silence. The light in Cyrus’ eyes dim as the bullet makes its way to his heart. He collapses over the railing into the crowd, arms still stretched wide as though a shadow of Christ on the cross falling into the arms of Mother Mary. His death didn’t just mark the end of unity, it sanctified it. A martyr, catalyst, and the beckoner of peace; Cyrus was not just a character, he was a stand-in for a real life Bronx gang member who suffered a similar fate.
Cornell Benjamin, namely known as Black Benjie, was a member of the Ghetto Brothers, a gang in the Bronx that doubled as both mob and dance group. When, like his fictional counterpart Cyrus, he was killed in a gang peace meeting-turned-violent altercation, an all-out turf war exploded. As Ghetto Brothers president Carlos “Karate Charlie” Suarez had put it, “The Bronx was going to be bathed in blood.”
And it was.
At the time, the Bronx had over 100 recorded gangs and following his death, tensions between neighborhoods led to blight, brutality, and the collapse of the community. The borough was a hollow shell of its once lively suburbia, a battlefield scarred by death, destruction, and despair. Tired and grieving, fifty gangs of the Bronx came together in a tight-lipped, closed-door meeting and brokered the 1971 Hoe Avenue peace treaty. The truce, and the communal gatherings it allowed, would pave the way for the birth of a new culture: Hip-Hop.
“Colors started to come off,” said Ghetto Brothers Founder ‘Yellow’ Benjie Melendez. “And little by little, that’s when the music started.”
On a humid night in August of 1973, Clive Campbell, a Bronx DJ who went by Kool Herc, was hosting a party in the recreation room of his apartment building. The air was thick with loud music, warm bodies, and the thundering steps of shuffling feet. The crowd was there that night because Herc had been doing something different with his DJ sets. He would isolate breakbeats by using two turntables to loop rhythms, taking the dancing grooves that might just last a few seconds and extending them for minutes. It was like a dancer’s paradise. The music was punchy and hot, a fusion of punk funk and classic soul, with names like James Brown in the mix. He kept people in motion, and, soon, gangs were resolving their disputes on the dance floor and not in the streets.
As best put by Herc himself, “[those beats] started something that enemies didn’t want to stop.”
That night in 1973, which began as a back-to-school fundraiser for his sister, changed the future of both music and dance. That’s when Jimmy Dee and Santiago Jojo Torres stepped in. In 1977, the duo transformed their street dance crew into one of the most influential and iconic breakdancing groups to come out of the projects. The Rock Steady Crew revolutionized breakdancing as a pop culture phenomenon, pioneering dance techniques that have influenced generations of dancers and immortalizing the art form as a key propeller of Hip-Hop culture. One fan even shared that the Crew’s impact is, “equivalent to the DC and Marvel universe. I saw them as superheroes of dance.” The Rock Steady Crew is mythic, a cultural epoch complete with its storied dancers, but legends all begin somewhere.
One of the first power moves a breakdancer will learn is the backspin, a technique that requires rotating the upper back while the legs and arms are used for momentum. The faster a dancer goes, the more skilled they become and the more confidence they gain. It’s a foundational move, one that marks the very beginning of a breakdancer’s journey, and it was created by a 12-year-old. Richard Colón was with his friend Lenny Len when they accidentally stumbled upon the spin. That same day, with callus-decorated passion, these two kids on Cortona Avenue in the Bronx also produced the W, a variation of the toprock that involves shifting weight to the arms so that the hips and knees push forward into a ‘W’ shape. A year later, Colón was welcomed by the entire Rock Steady Crew.
The debut of original Crew member Richard Colón, better known as the American b-boy pioneer Crazy Legs, was crafted entirely from community, identity, and the grounding feeling of passion. It’s why in 1976, when that same 10-year-old Puerto Rican kid placed a rubber mat underneath a rusty swingset, it became his refuge. He found comfort in the dust that would pick up as he toprocked, and the calluses that would build on his hands were carvings of identity.
If hip-hop was the genesis of bringing communities together, and breakdancing its nexus, it was Colón who led to its expansion, reimagining the scope of who, where, and why an individual breaks; ultimately cementing his name in its evolution.
Today, children will begin their breakdancing journey by practicing his windmill and will aspire to perfect the W, their legs double-backed behind them. Colón’s moves are foundational. Breakdancing has transported itself across the world, becoming a rite of passage for aspiring dancers and embedding itself into generations of children seeking sanctuary, so it’s no surprise it has become popular in Palestine.
Each practiced jump and flip meshed with the parade of clapping hands from fellow Gazan kids watching nearby is a welcome change to the sound of collapsed buildings, bombs, and mourning families these children witness. They perfect their moves with repeated precision on rubbled floors and watch as their calloused hands become reminders of their perseverance. This is not just an impassioned exercise for time to pass by, but a reclamation of their childhood. Each move danced is an initiatory rite experienced, a milestone many had stolen from them by blazing fire.
I think of the Instagram video from Breaking48 that introduced me to this form of sanctuary in Gaza. The Palestinian boy was elated, lost in his own makeshift world of hip-hop and breakdance. Smoke filled the air behind him and the walls that once cradled his childhood were nothing but rubbled relics fractured by Israeli shells. This was the Nusierat Refugee camp’s grim reality. Since 2023, the camp has weathered relentless airstrikes and has become a ghost of the neighborhood it once was. Death and destruction consumed the camp, with the latest strike killing six children who were waiting in line for water. Now, more than 90% of the homes in the area have been damaged or destroyed and at least 57,000 people have been killed across Gaza.
Yet the way the boy moves, like dancing was all he had left to hold on to, was a glaring contrast to the plethora of barbaric imagery surfacing from Gaza. He wasn’t ignoring the ruins that surrounded him, but refusing to be defined by it. The more I watched, the more lost I became in that world as well. I was transported to the Bronx – Cortona Avenue to be exact, where buildings were stripped bare by fire and rot – and he was no longer just a kid. He was an image of young Richard Colón; a b-boy legend of his own making.
Since 2004, Campbreakerz, a breakdancing school based in the Nuseirat camp, has been at the forefront of the hip-hop scene in Gaza. Using a UN school as a dance studio, Campbreakerz co-founder Ahmed Alghariz set up workshops for children who had been displaced from their homes by Israeli airstrikes – a spark of hope countering the burning fires of lost neighborhoods.
Now their work has encouraged other groups within the Gaza Strip to use Hip-Hop culture as a means of refuge, ultimately sheltering these children from the desolation of trauma. Among these groups is the aforementioned Breaking48, whose program was kickstarted by former CB crew dancers, Karim Azzam and Mohammed El Shafei. Beyond training them on the art of breaking, their workshops include the kids taking leadership of the class and teaching their fellow crewmates moves of their own.
Whether it be performing extensive routines for the kids, teaching them intricate footwork patterns, or entertaining them with stylistic poses often involved with the dance medium, this crew of breakdancing creatives, made up of trained Palestinian trauma counselors and dance educators, are using their artistry to give the children a sense of optimism in the bleakness of war.
For decades, trauma-informed dance has been used as a sanctuary all over the world. During Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge rule in 1975, any form of enlightenment was considered worthy of a death sentence. This isn’t to say that Apsara dancers were deliberately chosen to be killed, but they became casualties in a regime that saw culture as a threat. So the rich history embedded in the gilded costumes, intricate hand gestures, and foot movements that embody their ritual dance was muted by travesty. Yet, even in silence, a culture’s spirit can be deafening. It echoed on their journey out of Cambodia, and returned in refugee camps scattered all over Indonesia and Thailand, reuniting individuals fleeing genocide to the lives they had left behind. With arched feet and bent knees, silk sampots and crowns, and grounded bodies and spirits reaching towards the boundless celestial state, they called upon their ancestors, asking for guidance as they resisted cultural massacre.
In Chile, a similar resistance was unfolding. The cueca is traditionally performed with a partner, but in 1973, under the Pinochet dictatorship, the dance became a symbol of longing and protest for Chilean women. They dance alone. Not because they choose to, but because they must. Under Pinochet, loved ones were taken as political prisoners, stolen in the dead of night and never heard from again. La cueca sola became a haunting reminder of the ghosts of those lost. Every resounding foot stomp and waved handkerchief became defiance in the form of grief. It’s flirtatious yet hollow, and as they dance they sing, “I have lost what I love the most. I ask myself constantly, ‘Where do they have you?’ And nobody answers. Nobody comes.”
Panteras Negras energized that pain. This Chilean rap and breakdancing group used the foundations of hip-hop to rebel against authoritarian injustice. They’re lyrics are bullets of opposition, their songs the gun, breakdancing the deafening ricochet, and hip-hop the holster that holds it all together.
Former member Lalo Meneses had once said, “El rap es para mí como el rugido de una pantera que ya está cansada de tanto racismo, de tanta pobreza// Rap is for me like the roar of a panther that is already tired of so much racism, so much poverty.” Their lyricism and performance became an emblem of just that: radicalized music against the regime.
Songs like “Desde la basura” trilled with critique of marginalization – guttural and crisp in beat – and tracks like “Insurrección periférica” attacked systemic corruption through the emotional intensity of soul and rap. Their music ultimately embedded cultural conversation within political defiance, reintroducing dance into Santiago and reviving the silenced voice of the Chilean people.
Even today, Palestinians are using folklore as resistance, dancing the native Dabke to reclaim their identity and preserve indigenous practices from erasure. Think of the Palestinian dance troupe El-Funoun who founded the group as a rebellion against occupation – a reflection of the Rock Steady Crew – or Samaa Wakeem, who used Dabke as an exploration of culture and identity in the same means as Colón. In a 2020 TEDx talk, she dances delicately, her hands softly reaching for the sky before coming down into a full waist spin, the Dabke engulfing her entire body like a burning fire of identity. For Samaa, dance isn’t just a performance; it’s an act of human resistance.
Each stomp, drill, and synchronized movement resonates with the land – a show of reverence for the dead buried under the rubble – echoing through the resounding, all-consuming silence of Palestinian grief. Artistry has long kept, protected, and reclaimed stolen identity for those facing violence. In Gaza, these crafts are important means of asserting existence and creating conversations around trauma – thus the importance of Campbreakerz and Breaking48.
Videos of young Gazan dancers practicing their craft decorate its platform, each child breaking with delicate concentration and an unbothered jubilance. They wear jerseys with “Breaking” and “48” stamped on their backs and a tiny Palestinian flag glued to their hearts. In one clip, an assembly of boys are synchronized in dance as they move to DJ Leg1oner’s “God’s.” Another shows a young dancer solo breaking as his crew hypes him in the back, awestruck with childlike expressions, a contagion of happiness spreading from one face to the next. These children are enthralled and decorate the streets of Gaza because of breakdancing, even amid the shattered concrete that surrounds them.
While the violence and deprivation the children face have left deep-rooted scars, by teaching them how to break, they’ve instilled that same rhythmic camaraderie found in hip-hop’s beginnings into their neighborhoods. Even with a fraught silence looming in war’s presence, community, identity, and passion remain at the core of Palestinian resistance.
