Loud, funky beats fill the late summer air as two competitors eye each other from opposite ends of a patch of wood-grained lino.
At one end, BBoy Akorn in cargo pants, a loose black t-shirt, black cap and Adidas kicks. At the other, BBoy Simba in black pants, blue hoodie and a black beanie.
An expectant 300-strong crowd watch them prowl up and down the edge of the 3.5 x 2.5 metre lino stage that's taped to a wooden walkway overlooking the Waikato River.
It's BBoy Akorn who steps out first, in a twirling, gravity-defying set of moves, getting slowly closer to his opponent. BBoy Simba studiously ignores the flying body just inches from his face and keeps his head down, nodding to the beat and waiting his turn.
With a final flourish, BBoy Akorn is on his feet, turns his back and walks off.
BBoy Simba responds with an equally dizzying display. Both dancers deliver two blistering sets in this one-on-one battle for breaking supremacy in the final of the Great Kiwi Break Off.
It's close. The judges can't separate them and call for an extra set. The crowd's loving it but the breakers have already made it through three rounds of head-to-head dance battles, it's the end of a long, hot day and the pressure is mounting.
BBoy Akorn ultimately gets the nod from the judges and pockets the $750 cash prize. More importantly, he also scores crucial ranking points that will count for a lot in his bid to represent Aotearoa New Zealand in breaking at next year's Olympic Games.
Breaking, which most people mistakenly term breakdancing, was given the nod for Paris 2024 after debuting at the Youth Olympics in Buenos Aires in 2018. It will be one of three new sports included in the global sporting showpiece, along with sport climbing and skateboarding.
The Great Kiwi Break Off is the first of four ranking events being held by the Aotearoa New Zealand Breaking Association to find our top BBoy and BGirl, with others to be held in Māngere, Wellington and Christchurch over coming months.
Organiser Dujon Cullingford says the breaking community have had to hustle to take advantage of the Olympic opportunity.
Photo: Fabrice Coquet
"We had to create an incorporated society for our own dance community and then we could be recognised as official partners with DanceSport New Zealand, and then the New Zealand Olympic Committee could recognise us properly to put on these events."
When the top breakers have been found, "then we can go to New Zealand Olympic Committee and also garner support from our community, put that support behind the top athletes so they can compete in the international qualifiers, which gain you points directly on that road to the Olympics".
He concedes it won't be easy.
"At this point we remain hopeful but we'll be happy if our community comes together and we're able to support those top people. A lot of our top dancers have a day job, hardly any of us dance fulltime, so that's quite hard. But yeah, hopefully."
Hamilton winner BBoy Akorn - Aron Mahuika, 34, from Christchurch - is one of the country's top breakers and aims on getting to all the ranking events. Paris is very much on his mind, and while he's successfully competed overseas before, he knows the step up to international level is "massive".
"I'll definitely give it everything I have otherwise I wouldn't train so hard for it," he says.
Along with being fit, Cullingford says competitive breakers need to be all-rounders.
"In this competition format it's not for everybody. Some of the best dancers might never enter a competition. But a competition dancer these days, they really have to have an ability to put all their moves together succinctly, they use what we call blow-ups which are short, sharp combinations that really attract the eye and they're able to sweep through all the categories of breaking, they've got good footwork, freezes, power and they bring it together nicely.
"Dancers usually start with the dancing aspect up top, which is called Top Rock, you're rocking it up top, so there'll be dance steps and judges will be looking out for their musicality, their ability to improvise and then they usually go down into the footwork, the main content of their set. It's how it all comes together on the day, whether you can execute your movement, find a part of the track to kind of accentuate, work with the crowd and dominate the other dancer, really."
Photo: Fabrice Coquet
One of the three judges in Hamilton, BBoy Booda - David Kim - himself a top breaker, says while it's always subjective, he's hoping to see breakers who have it all.
"In a competition like this I'm looking at pretty much everything. At the Olympics they need to be all-rounders, original, their foundations should be solid and locked down."
Cullingford says while not everyone is keen to see breaking in the Olympics, there have been international competitions held for years "so it's nothing new".
"You know, everyone likes underground culture but sometimes you can only stay underground for so long. So I think this whole Olympics thing, the competition is amazing but what it gives us is the ability to leverage off it, to kind of rekindle the flames of that hip-hop culture across the country."
It's that culture and sense of community which drives him and everyone else involved in the Great Kiwi Break Off.
Even champion breaker BBoy Akorn says there are more important things in breaking than winning competitions.
"The community, the friends, the challenge of it. The ability to just create and express youself in different ways. There's no rule book. There's your fundamental moves but you grow off that and put your own personality into it so it's really good."
Fellow competitor BBoy Jester - Morgan Hawkins from Kirikiriroa crew the U-Knights - says breaking is a strong, supportive and diverse community.
"I enjoy how it brings heaps of people together, different cultures and ethnicities. If I didn't jam breaking I wouldn't have like African friends and Asian friends and all these other different friends, American friends. It's always mean seeing all my dancing community come together, I hardly ever see them so it just picks the wairua up."
Cullingford, 35, is from the current generation of breakers and says the culture is in need of a pick me up.
"Our crew, the U-Knights, have probably been holding it down the last 10 years and we haven't been as active the last four to five years really. When I started in 2000, the guys who were the best in Hamilton at that time were competing against the best in New Zealand and we've always had a strong scene in Hamilton, pretty much since the '80s."
Photo: Fabrice Coquet
As a sport and dance movement, breaking has been around since the early 1970s. New York DJ Kool Herc is often credited as the originator after he used two copies of the same record on two turntables so he could repeat and extend the instrumental breaks in songs, allowing time for the dancers to do their thing.
In Aotearoa New Zealand, breaking started to gain traction in the early 1980s, thanks to the importation of American popular culture through songs such as Malcolm McLaren's Buffalo Gals in 1982, the Rock Steady Crew's Hey You in 1983 and the hugely influential movie Beat Street the following year.
Ric Rush, 53, was among the first generation of Hamilton breakers and is still involved in music as a high-profile DJ.
"As soon as we saw Buffalo Gals on TV we just saw this amazing kind of dance and the music and the scratching from the DJs and we just tried to emulate the same," he says.
He and his friends in the Hamilton suburb of Fairfield were hooked.
"Pretty soon after that there was like Hey You by the Rock Steady Crew and that level of break dancing skill was way higher, but we were still on the level of Buffalo Gals, trying to get our moves on, that's where it all started for us.
"It was super strong in Hamilton. We had a real good breakdancing scene, probably up there with Auckland and Wellington. They were the best 'cos they had all the major populations but we had a real top group of people."
Photo: Fabrice Coquet
He says it brought people from across the city together in ways which would never have otherwise happened.
"We got to know people from Melville, people from Te Rapa, people from everywhere through breakdancing and it made us all become friends. It's all about love in the end. They look like they want to kill each other on the floor but at the end it's all love."
For another veteran Fairfield breaker, 55-year-old Fabian Edwards, it was all about the music and the community.
"There was rugby league and rugby... but this was a much more energetic way to express yourself and people got in there and got themselves a name. A key inspiration for us at the time were The Rock Steady Crew, they were groundbreakers and they incorporated male and female dancers expressing themselves, it was really cool. It was inspirational to how we were as a whānau or a community in the day. So as much as it was an expression of a challenge and to try and be better than somebody else, it was a matter of community as well, there was a love for each other. And the music was just amazing."
He's stoked to see breaking not only survive, but thrive enough to be included in the Olympics.
"I'm over the moon," he says.
"Seeing it now, it's next level. These guys are gymnasts, athletes, street runners, parkour, all combined into one and they just have this amazing gymnastic ability. It fully deserves to be in the Olympics. I guess it's a big push against what the human body can do, and you see some of those challenges that they throw down now, wow.
"To see them go out and represent it in the right fashion and to be healthy, doing something with the community involved and just being involved in something positive, what's not to like?"
Photo: Fabrice Coquet
