Re-Contextualising Breakdance Aesthetics: Performance, Performativity, and Re-Enaction of Breakdancing in Uganda

Abstract

ABSTRACT Since its creation in the South Bronx in the 1970s, breakdance has proliferated worldwide. In the last three decades, urban youth in Uganda have reconfigured breakdance aesthetics to reflect their creative visions and imagination and in response to the local material conditions in Kampala city. This article examines how the youth have reconfigured, localised, and re-interpreted breakdance aesthetics. I analyse the ways in which breakdancers have anchored their practices in their local social, cultural, political, and artistic conditions and experiences. Building on the stories of the youth, the analysis identifies media as a catalyst in shaping the breakdancers’ kinaesthetic re-imagination, redefinition, appropriation, and adaptation of breakdance. The discussion documents how the youth have constructed breakdance communities of practice, by engaging in performances that embody and manifest their range of experience, including their struggles, realities of deprivation and alienation, but also their sense of connection, their forms of political advocacy and their creativity. The discussion demonstrates how breakdance can be seen as the embodiment of an agenda that gives agency to the youth, and forms of agency that are situated in local realities.