Windmill, head-spin, flair, and freeze — from the streets of 1970s New York City to the 2024 Paris Olympics, breakdancing is being celebrated in a big way. Like, 18-feet-tall and 7,000-pounds big.
On Thursday, July 25, Collab, a fabrication lab and innovation studio in Brooklyn, unveiled its towering statue of “Rappin’ Max Robot” in tribute to breakdancing making its debut in the Olympic games this year. The titular character of the very first hip hop comic book created by Eric Orr in 1986 with help from his buddy Keith Haring is symbolic of the popular dance of the time — the robot was Orr’s favorite move. The sculpture will be gifted to Paris, where it will live at the Place de la Bataille-de-Stalingrad in perpetuity.
But before finding his new home in France, Rappin’ Max will sit in front of the not-yet-opened Hip Hop Museum in the South Bronx for one year.
“When it goes to Paris, we’re embedding a $50,000 speaker into the boom box and we’re going to connect that speaker to The Hip Hop Museum so DJs can listen to it,” Marc Levin, who co-founded Collab along with his wife Adina Levin, told Hyperallergic at the unveiling party last week. Welder Underground, the studio’s apprenticeship program launched earlier this year, forged the steel behemoth with funds from the American-Swedish industrial company Elektriska Svetsnings-Aktiebolaget.
In true B-Boy fashion, Max stands with his four-fingered right hand upon his hip, his left foot atop a boombox and his left elbow perched on his left knee. Five Olympic rings are a stand-in for the tuning and volume dials on the giant radio, with the Roman numerals “XXXIII” etched into the steel commemorating the 33rd international athletic competition.
For thousands of years, the Olympics have been a testament to personal strength and athleticism. Thanks in part to the 1983 documentary Wild Style exposing the underbelly of hip hop in the South Bronx and Manhattan’s Lower East Side, breaking has been at the center of competitions across the world for decades and has now joined the ranks in the prestigious global competition. Although this is the first time breaking has made it into the Olympic games, the sport was part of the 2018 Youth Summer Olympics in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
“We had to update the judging system because they were dancers, but they’re athletes now,” said Victor Gabriel Alicea III aka Kid Glyde, the breakdancing head judge for the World Dance Sport Federation, the entity judging this year’s breaking competition.
Alicea, founder of the Kids Breaking League, represents Puerto Rico and will not be a judge at this year’s games, but was instrumental in creating the scoring system.
On August 9 and 10, 16 B-Boys and 16 B-Girls will go headspin-to-headspin, battling it out for the gold and judged in five, equally scoring categories: vocabulary, technique, execution, originality and musicality.
At the unveiling party in Brooklyn, Max had one antenna attached to his head while a crowd wearing welding masks looked on and cheered. On the last day of the breaking Olympics, Max will have his second antenna attached at 585 Exterior Street in the Bronx, where he will stand for locals to enjoy before moving to Paris next July — although there are rumors that he may tour the city before he bids us adieu.
