Spectator Competition: Breaking it down

In Competition 3365 you were invited to submit an extract from a PhD about an aspect of street culture. Obviously this was inspired by Rachael Gunn, aka Raygun, the Australian academic/Olympic break-dancer who wrote a PhD on the cultural politics of breakdancing. This intro has to be short to make room for all the long words. Respect to Bob Newman, W.J. Webster, Bill Greenwell, Mark Hunter Brown and others – and the winners get £25.

Citius, Altius, Grooviest: An Investigation into the Classical Origins of Breakdance as an Olympic Sport. With an Excursus on Biblical Parallels.

In view of objections to breaking as a legitimate Olympic activity, its origins are here sought in the context of early Greek history, from which it may be inferred that the movements, especially those at ground level with sudden and unexpected twists, were intended originally as a military activity involving two warriors, which had to end in the death of one competitor. Several of the battles in the Iliad may be interpreted in this pattern. The moves would have been practised in individual training in the agora by virile young men. In pre-Hellenic/early Hebraic social tradition, II Samuel 6 makes clear that King David performed such moves in a public place before onlookers(as in the present-day Olympics), though this time as a solo performer, rather than adversarially…

Brian Murdoch

The gradual outphasing of the intrinsically go-to pejorative-suggestion term graffiti (and also its singular, graffito, used only by reactionary hemi-demi-semi scholars) has meant that street art has gathered a wide enchiridion of labels. The preferred term in this thesis will be Performance Scrawl (henceforth PS). As Smartass showed in his groundbreaking 2014 study (‘Spraycans in Existential Context’ – see Bibliography, Vol 17), what may appear in the pattern to be an accidental abbreviation of wiggle-wiggle–wiggle to wiggle-wiggle-wigg is in fact a clear reference to the unpredictability of gravitational pull.