On Friday, breaking makes its Olympics debut at the Place de la Concorde in Paris. This form of dance, created by Black youths in the Bronx in the early 1970s, has traveled far from its birthplace. It is now studied, practiced and performed enthusiastically in countries all over the world — and has inspired Olympic-bound B-boys and B-girls, as the dancers are called, from a diverse group of countries including Canada, Ukraine, Japan, South Korea and France.
Over a half-century from its origins, breaking has become another American-grown art form that, much like jazz, other nations are now cultivating more imaginatively than we are.
Support for hip-hop education in the States typically comes from nonprofit organizations, after-school programs and for-profit dance schools. Despite breaking’s American roots, it has never been institutionally supported in public schools as part of a coordinated national policy. In France, however, an enlightened arts education effort is helping to identify and train the dancers who could represent the form’s future.
Consider what’s happening in Paris’s chic Third Arrondissement, about three miles northeast of the Olympic dance floor. The Lycée Turgot, a public high school housed in a majestic 19th-century building, has for the past seven years been home to France’s premier national hip-hop dance program.
Each year, about 50 dancers compete for admission to some 15 slots at Lycée Turgot’s “section of hip-hop dances excellence.” One-third of the dancers are breakers, while the rest dance in a style that the French call “debout” or “standing” dance, which includes popping, locking, house and “hip-hop newstyle.” The dancers admitted to the program receive three years of some of the best arts education any aspiring breaker could imagine.
In addition to taking courses in traditional academic study, Turgot’s hip-hop cohort focuses on developing the elements of breaking — mind, body and soul — by following an expansive hip-hop pedagogy. For up to 12 hours a week students train, learn technique and analyze hip-hop history and battle strategy, all while being instructed in respect, openness and self-knowledge.
Each day, the students arrive to dance in a bright room with high ceilings, emerald Ionic columns, and barre railings and mirrors. They move in baggy sweaters and joggers, their sneakers squeaking across the blonde hardwood, free to occupy their portions of the floor and make magic with their bodies.
David Bérillon, the founder of Turgot’s hip-hop section, runs his students through choreographed routines and improvisational battle sessions. Teaching hip-hop dance requires attention to balance: fostering the excitement of competition with bold, creative expression, while helping the students use movement as a tool of self-inquiry and collective effort.
About 15 middle-school hip-hop dance programs across France currently feed applicants to Turgot. Thierry Demaizière and Alban Teurlai’s acclaimed 2022 documentary, “Allons Enfants” (released in the United States as “Rookies”), spotlighted Mr. Bérillon and his students. B-girl Señorita Carlota, who will be competing for France on the Olympic stage, is a current post-baccalaureate student at Turgot.
Many of Turgot’s dancers come from the working-class suburbs that are home to students of African and Arab descent. Applicants have been accepted from as far away as Germany, Norway and Réunion, a French island in the Indian Ocean. Educators often point to the school’s diversity as a model for France, with its long history of colonialism and racial tensions — which erupted in widespread riots in 2023.
When 19-year-old Jade Rincla, whose parents are from the French West Indies, first came to the Lycée from the Saint-Ouen-sur-Seine, a suburb north of Paris in Seine-Saint-Denis, she worried she’d feel out of place. Some of her classmates were born to the professional class and carried Balenciaga bags. If they talked about Seine-Saint-Denis, it was, she said, “often for the wrong reasons.”
The hip-hop section gave her confidence and purpose. “Entering Turgot also meant maturing,” she said. She carried the Olympic torch through Seine-Saint-Denis and danced on the barge on the Seine in the opening ceremony, and now plans to attend the Université Paris Cité to study biotechnology.
“Hip-hop allows you to open up to the world,” she says. “There are no barriers.”
Hip-hop first landed in France in 1982, when an elite group of ambassadors from New York City, including rappers, DJs, graffiti artists, double Dutch dancers and the popular breakers the Rock Steady Crew, toured the country. Crowds were often small, but by the time they had left, a contingent of French fans was hooked, especially on breaking.
Two years later, Mr. Bérillon was one of thousands of French viewers tuning into a national television show titled “H.I.P.H.O.P.,” often cited as the first program of its kind. By the end of the 1980s, France had become the second biggest hip-hop market in the world.
Mr. Bérillon began breaking at the relatively late age of 22. He was a long jumper studying to become a physical education teacher but was losing interest in track and field. He was galvanized by hearing hip-hop lecturers, including Lamine Diouf from the world champion Vagabond Crew, which inspired him to set out on a 25-year mission to bring hip-hop dance into France’s public schools.
In 2017, Mr. Bérillon, who had already been working at the Lycée Turgot, found a principal willing to take risks with the curriculum. Funding from the Ministry of National Education and L’Académie de Paris quickly followed. With the announcement that breaking would debut as an event in Buenos Aires at the 2018 Youth Olympics, Mr. Bérillon’s mission seemed visionary. Breaking’s success as an Olympic sport in Argentina — and the infrastructure France had already built around it — may have figured in the decision to greenlight its debut as an official sport in Paris in 2024.
Rules adopted by the International Olympic Committee in 2014 dictated that, starting with the 2020 Tokyo Games, each host city could submit additional sports to be part of the games. For the 2024 games, Paris lobbied to include breaking, following its 2018 success. The 2028 Olympic Summer Games will be held in Los Angeles, but breaking was not selected by organizers. (Flag football and squash will be making their Olympic debuts in Los Angeles.)
Despite breaking’s roots in the United States — and its global popularity — it’s received little official support in this country, where cultural policy is left largely to the marketplace. In the United States, breakers and a small group of entrepreneurs have relied on private capital, corporate sponsorships and a lot of bootstrapping to build an infrastructure of private academies and national professional tours.
The success of the Turgot school makes a case that breaking should be part of a national curriculum in America. Educators like Mr. Bérillon see in the dance a tool for self-expression, creativity, even spiritual discovery.
The dance battle, performed in a circle called a cypher, remains at the heart of breaking. In a cypher, the dancer is enclosed by a community who’ve gathered there to witness and affirm their joy, surprise and awe as dancers express themselves.
“Turgot, c’est pour la vie, une grande famille,” Mr. Bérillon said, which translates as “Turgot is for life, a big family.”
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