Rankin Inlet sets aside usual entertainment for an evening with their hip-hopping offspring
For one night, break-dancing trumps bingo
It's not easy competing with bingo night in Rankin Inlet.
Yet hundreds of adults gave up their usual weekly entertainment on Saturday, Sept. 8 to watch more than 100 children "battle" each other in a break-dance competition, held in the gymnasium of Maani Ulujuk school.
"I was told the bingo would interfere. People made the right choice," says Stephen Leafloor, a stocky, bald middle-aged man better known in the break-dancing world as Buddha.
Leafloor and his crew of dancers, the Canadian Floor Masters, spent a week preparing the children for their big performance in the gym. Kids practiced dance moves for about six hours each day after classes.
Between exercises, the group talked about a lot more than fancy dance moves. Leafloor is also a social worker, and he describes every life challenge as just another dance move to try, stumble over, and eventually master.
"What is life, really?" he asks. "Life is about risk." For students, that holds whether it's asking out a guy or girl, dressing differently, or applying for a first job.
Similarly, when "you take a risk to try the backspin that becomes a bumspin," in front of 100 of your peers, you learn quickly not to mock the next person to try a challenging dance move and fail, he says.
Give a student the self-confidence to take risks, Leafloor says, and not only will she dance. Chances are, she'll succeed in life.
He also talked about healthy living. After all, Leafloor says, you'll have trouble pulling off a backflip like him if you puff on cigarettes, drink, don't eat well or don't exercise regularly.
"It's a hell of a lot of hard work," he says of being a breakdancer. "And guess what? None of us smoke."
Chewing tobacco isn't helpful, either, and Leafloor was surprised that not only was chew popular among some young kids, but that their parents bought it for them.
"Unequivocally, that's bad parenting. A 12-year-old should not be chewing tobacco," he says.
Some were surprised with his candour. But Leafloor says, as a visitor, he's able to express some truths that would be otherwise difficult to say to neighbours in a remote community.
He also talked a lot about bullying, which is prevalent across the country, but especially bad in Nunavut. And as Leafloor says, "it just takes one bad bullying experience to put kids in their shell the whole high school."
And he talked about suicide, depression, abusive relationships, and other touchy subjects. Often the kids didn't speak much. But they didn't need to.
"I can see the emotion welling up in kids' faces, even if they don't speak," he says.
During the workshop some petty rivalries between kids melted away, once they became part of the same dance crew. "A lot of times you hate people when you don't even know them," Leafloor says. "You're making assumptions."
At the big show the gym was full of spectators. So was the observing area.
One tearful mother was surprised to see her daughter throat-singing. "She taught her to throat sing but she didn't like to do it anymore," Leafloor says.
But when throat-singing was mixed with beat-boxing – "drumbeat we create with our mouths" – suddenly, it became "cool again."
There are also some surprising overlaps between traditional Inuit culture and hip-hop.
After all, there is an Inuit tradition of resolving disputes through drumsong contests, where an opponent is mocked and taunted through song, which is similar to the hip-hop tradition of trading rhyming insults in a "battle."
There are plenty of obvious differences between kids in the South Bronx of New York and kids in Nunavut. But the two groups have one thing in common, Leafloor says, which is likely why hip-hop is so popular in the North: the feeling among young people that they are "isolated, like they don't really have a voice in the world."
That, and the fact that "young people love to create something new and spontaneous on the spot."
By the week's end, participants were petitioning the principal to allocate a new breakdancing club with gym-time. They got it.
The Floor Masters have done similar workshops in Iqaluit, Clyde River and Pangnirtung in Nunavut, and Inukjuak, Kuujjuaraapik and Puvirnituk in Nunavik.
The group hopes to visit Arctic Bay, Pond Inlet and Resolute Bay this winter.
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