As thousands of athletes, spectators and officials descend on Paris for next Friday’s opening of the Paris Olympics, Nicolas Guilloteau dreams that he can achieve something unexpected and special that the world will remember for the ages, a “magical moment”.
His Olympic discipline is not the parallel bars, the javelin or the 100 metres, however. If the 41-year-old Frenchman is selected from a shortlist, he will perform with two turntables and a crate of vinyl – not as an athlete but under his nom de plume DJ One Up, as one of the disc jockeys providing a soundtrack for the breakdancers making their Olympic debut this year.
Breakdancing, more commonly known among athletes as breaking, is one of two new Olympic sports at the Paris Games, and in the shape of the DJ the discipline introduces a role that is entirely novel to the rules and conventions of the ancient multisport event: someone who is neither quite an athlete nor an official but an artist.
For one thing, unlike with traditional Olympic disciplines that come with a musical accompaniment – such as artistic swimming and figure skating – breakdancers don’t get to choose their own soundtrack.
DJs such as Guilloteau see it as their mission not just to support the dancers – known as b-boys and b-girls – with familiar tunes but to surprise them.
“For me the most important thing in a competition is to create an atmosphere. We do that by providing a comfort zone with the classics,” he said. “But the role and the responsibility of the DJs also is to create a magical moment, and we do that with music that nobody knows.”
One of the five pillars of the hip-hop movement that emerged from the Bronx borough in New York City in the 1970s, the evolution of breaking is inseparable from music: its very name refers to the instrumental section of a funk track – the “break” – which the genre’s founding father DJ Kool Herc would loop by switching between two simultaneously rotating turntables.
At modern breaking competitions, DJs still use the same “merry-go-round” method to build a soundtrack to which dancers perform their toprocks, freezes or headspin power moves, though software programmes are now commonly used to identify the percussive sections on the vinyl’s grooves.
Unlike DJs playing sets at parties or nightclubs, competition disk jockeys cannot afford to concentrate solely on getting the needle into the right groove. “Sometimes you have only five seconds to react because you never know when the dancer will finish their round,” said Marcin Przeplasko, AKA DJ Plash, a professional DJ from Kraków, Poland. “You must control everything.”
Seventies-era classics such as James Brown’s Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved are still part of the standard repertoire, though Guilloteau insists the art of DJing for competitive breaking must also entail challenging athletes with curveballs, such as 1970s English prog-rock band Babe Ruth’s The Mexican or Nina Simone’s jazzy Funkier Than a Mosquito’s Tweeter.
“Some dancers prefer funk, some prefer electronic music,” said Guilloteau. “But to me improvisation is key to breaking culture. We DJs are not here to create a choreography.”
Nonetheless, turning breaking into an Olympic sport has required imposing rules and restrictions that do not always come naturally to a culture that has grown out of parties and social gatherings.
In Paris, DJs have to curate their mix from a limited playlist of about 390 tracks, whose rights have been pre-cleared to be played on live TV. The playlist’s content is highly confidential but would not only include familiar songs, said Martin Gilian, a spokesperson for the World Dance Sport Federation (WDSF). “Some of them the breakers will have heard before, some are more rare.”
At conventional b-boy and b-girl gatherings, dancers often compete against each other as teams or “crews”, which Gilian describes as “the essence of breaking, the cream of the crop”. At the Olympics, however, 32 athletes will face off in solo battles at two separate events at the Place de la Concorde, one for women on 9 August and one for men on 10 August.
Most DJs in competitive breaking developed a sense for the perfect set not behind the decks but on the dance floor. Przeplasko was a b-boy before he became a DJ. “Every two years I try to master another hip-hop element,” he said.
But in Paris the DJs will not allowed to mingle with their erstwhile peers. As “international technical officials”, or ITOs, “they can say hello to the dancers but are not allowed to hang out”, said Gilian, to minimise the chances of dancers trying influence the set.
Some dancers will undoubtedly find other ways to provide feedback. “Of course some b-boys and b-girls don’t like my music. Sometimes you see it on their faces – ‘I’m really not into this’,” said Przeplasko.
But disc jockeys have to stick to their course. “During the competition I have to block out my friendships and focus on being fair to every dancer,” Przeplasko said. “Everybody must have good music. That’s all there is to it.”
