By Jordan Muhlestein
On a Friday afternoon, two men walked into the Wilkinson Center carrying a 10-foot roll of linoleum flooring on their shoulders.
No, the Cougareat wasn”t remodeling.
The men were not wearing tool-belts. In fact, from the appearance of their low-hanging pants, they weren”t wearing any belts at all.
The man in front wore a sideways retro NBA hat and shoes without laces. The tongues hung out like, well, tongues. His partner sported a beanie despite the sunny weather and a multicolored sweatband strategically placed just below his elbow.
As the men unrolled their cargo, curious students began to circle, suspecting a show was about to begin.
Within minutes a large sound system was pumping deep, bass beats into an energized crowd, and the linoleum-delivery men were spinning and sliding their bodies along the floor, generating ooh”s, aah”s and ”How”d he do that”s from those watching.
The men were break dancing.
BYU is well known for being a stone-cold sober university attended by straight-laced conservative students; however, there are groups at the school that represent other niches. One of these groups is the school”s break dance club, the BYU Breakers. The Breakers consist of students who, along with other school and church activities, groove to the beat of a different drum machine. They are able to blend the seemingly contradictory cultures of Mormonism and Hip-Hop and create a flow all their own.
“The club is basically good people that like to help each other,” said Brian Pickup, 21, a freshman from Allen, Texas. “In our club it”s fairly nice. When I broke with other breakers in Dallas, they wouldn”t care about how you were, [here] they do.”
The break dance club not only helps its own members, it reaches out to the community, spreading good will and teaching lessons of life.
Eric Ryan, 22, also from Allen, Texas, said the club members all try to be service oriented.
The club has performed for BYUSA several times, including the Unforum and Spring Fling in April. They also perform at schools and juvenile centers.
“We do a lot of shows where we go and teach kids about talents, goals, practice and to never give up,” Ryan said. “We like to influence kids and encourage them to go to college.”
The club”s president, Tyson Stevens, 23, a sophomore business management major from Rohnert Park, Calif., said the club has performed some charity shows with Alex Boy?, a pop singer from England.
Boy?, who now lives in Utah Valley, performed with the pop group “Awesome” in England and sang for Prince Charles.
“If you get good at anything then you have the opportunity to meet more people and touch people”s lives and be an example,” Stevens said.
Break dancing is just like any pursuit in life, he said, you learn it step by step.
Those steps take time, patience and pain.
Stevens started breaking when he was 14-years old.
“I don”t even know if I knew it was break dancing or not,” Stevens said. “My brothers put me out in a circle at youth conference and I did the two moves I knew. Everybody liked it, so I learned more.”
Pickup said he landed on his face and had a black eye for a week when he was practicing a trick, the air flare, where the dancer spins around on his hands with his legs flying through the air.
“In high school we saw someone break, so a buddy and I tried it,” he said. “He tried and quit after a week, because it was hard. I liked it, so I stuck with it.”
Ryan said he learned in high school as well, as some tennis teammates taught him when their practice was rained-out.
“I learned some basic stuff and then I didn”t start doing a lot until after my first semester of college,” Ryan said.
No break dance club existed during his first year, so he learned from friends.
“The club didn”t come about until about two years ago,” he said. “If you come out to the club we always teach newcomers how to break.” Andrew Pickup, Brian”s brother, said he appreciates the way the Breakers don”t compromise their values while creating a good break-dancing atmosphere.
“They try to find songs that have a good beat for dancing and are appropriate for church standards,” he said.
Break dancing started on the streets of New York City in the early 1970”s and was made popular by pop stars like Michael Jackson and several break-dancing movies in the 1980”s.
As Hip-hop and Rap music have grown in popularity in the last decade, break dancing has grown as well.
A group of break-dancers recently performed for Pope John Paul II and received a papal blessing for glorifying God by enhancing their talents.
Ryan said if he could perform for anyone, he would want to go to a third world country and do a charity show. He said any performance is exciting for the Breakers, though.
“We try to get the audience involved,” he said. “The more the audience gets into it the more we get into. We want everybody clapping and yelling and screaming.”
