A long time ago at a Foo Fest far, far away, I witnessed something marvelous happening. It was late at night, perhaps 11 PM or midnight, and things were beginning to settle down. Everyone was watching the band on the outdoor stage, and the artists, vendors, and organizations who had been doing programming under the big tent had mostly cleared out and gone home. In this empty, unused space that had suddenly appeared, a group of a dozen teenagers had initiated an impromptu breakdancing session on the raw pavement without even a piece of cardboard to cushion their landings. Participants cycled in and out, sometimes squaring off against each other, sometimes solo, all to the beats coming from a portable speaker and someone’s phone. I gawked at the acrobatics for a minute and then carried on with the business of helping to break down the fest in hopes of getting home before 3am.
I had forgotten about that crew of breakers until very recently when my co-worker Saulo Castillo, AS220’s Development Manager, presented his plans to organize the first ever official breakdancing jam at Foo Fest, the “Cypher Pressure Dance Jam”. I sat down with him to get the details and also dig into his history with breaking in Providence.
Tell me about The Park Studios and All City Rockers, who are presenting this jam.
SC: I’m the co-founder of The Park Studios. The Park Studios is a creative hub rooted in PVD, dedicated to supporting and uplifting BIPOC artists and voices in music, media, and visual arts through access to space, tools, and professional development. We are collaborating with Kelvin ‘Poppin Groove’ Romero, Poyfy ‘Mr. Baez’ Baez, Gerson ‘Bboy Gerson’ Castillo, and Irving ‘Irv Styles’ Romero of the legendary local dance crew, All City Rockers. All City Rockers is a PVD-based, multi-generational hip-hop crew that’s dedicated to preserving and elevating core elements of its culture, like breaking, deejaying, and graffiti, with members all across the world, including the Dominican Republic and Russia. They’re one of RI’s most decorated battle crews, with members who’ve competed and performed worldwide.
For someone who hasn’t been to a breaking jam before, can you give a little taste of what’ll happen?
The jam is going to be in the middle of Foo Fest, from 2 to 5pm. It’s a super raw, authentic, old-school breakdancing, spinning on your head, windmills, kind of vibe. It’s an invitational “seven to smoke” style, essentially a king of the hill battle. Everyone lines up to take down one person, and you need to get to seven wins to win the whole competition. There’ll be a live DJ playing hip-hop, house, and all-around dope dance music. DJ Irv Styles of All City Rockers will be holding it down on the 1s and 2s, playing a host of breaks. For those that don’t know what breaks are, breaks are literally just like the break in a song where the vocals drop out and it’s just straight up raw drum beats and maybe a little bit of stylized melody. That’s kind of what hip-hop is – it was born from those breaks in rock and funk records. We’ll also have kids dance cyphers, and live graffiti art and painting happening.
What’s your personal history with breaking?
I’ve always been a hip-hop head. I started dancing when I was 16. Took it seriously, and then around 18 danced professionally and competed across the US., traveled to different competitions, joined a crew, and created different dance programming at different schools and after-school programs all across the city. I taught breakdancing from 2011 up until about 2023, at Brown, at Providence City Arts, here at AS220, and more. Myself and the Rockers, we all originally met as really young kids at AS220, upstairs at the third floor dance studio on Empire Street. At the time, I don’t even think we liked each other, but that’s kind of what hiphop is. You just come into the only space that’s available, and you just practice. It was an open practice, and we were there to do what we had to do.
At the time (2007-2011ish), it was some other entity (Perishable Theatre) that ran the dance studio space, so we had to rent it out hourly for practice. Izzy would rent it and open up the space for community members to practice, and ask dancers to donate a dollar so they could pay the hourly rate. This is where I met OGs like Bboy Spaz and Bboy Red, who inspired me to learn powermoves. A bunch of different groups came and practiced out of that space: All City Rockers, Swift Characters, and people would come from all over for it, even folks from Massachusetts and Connecticut would come and practice with us.
Why did you want to bring this to Foo Fest this year?
It’s really important to bring this back full circle to AS220, because this place is literally how I started and how I became an artist in general, being in this space as a youth member. And now, as a staff member working here, it’s important to bring back that same energy and love for this place. •