Above is a picture of me from a Wichita Eagle feature about breakdancing in Wichita in late 2000. I got into bboying in high school and never really met anyone else around Wichita who did it also until around 1999. There was a group known as Many Nations that used to throw hip-hop parties at The Cotillion. Imagine 1,000 people just vibing out to great music. It was wonderful. One of the DJ's who would spin was named Eddie. He was a Puerto Rican from the Bronx who had moved here. Also DJ Kulayde would spin and the first hour I would go on and do my thing. I had been breakin for awhile, but not really taking it seriously so I was at the party just to hang out. I went with a friend of mine named Jermaine who was one of the nicest emcees that Wichita has seen (Will have more on him and his group Supreme Unaltered in coming week.) Jermaine and I began a crew called Infinite Wrecking Crew and this was one of the first events we went to rep at. Back in those days I went by Kid Nouveau ( The New Kid). I believe it was while Kulayde was spinning that Rapper's Delight starting playing over the speakers. I remember seeing a circle to start form in the back and I saw about 5 people breakin! I hadn't ever seen that many people breakin in Wichita before. That night I met the BOK (Brothers of Koas - 2 graff heads who I will also talk more about in coming weeks). There were also 2 other people brekain that night. One was a short black guy named Chris but he went by Kawshin. Also there that night was a young guy who I found out had a huge pashion for bboying and hip-hop culture. His name was Pat... but most people know him as Paturn. We battled for a bit and exchanged numbers and that began a new wave of breakin in Wichita's hip-hop history.
We began practicing quite a bit. We would go to Evergreen Rec. at LEAST twice a week and sometimes meet up on the weekend to practice new moves and what we had learned. We also started traveling to different events and meeting some of the different people who were into breakin and hip-hop culture around the country. The word started getting out about these kids who were breakdancing at Evergreen and we started getting more and more people stopping by. There was a crew known as the Floormasters who were the sons and relatives of the original Floormasters from Wichita back in the mid-late 80's. I used to hear stories about the Floormasters winning the bboy battles that they had at Towne East in the 80's that were huge! We decided it was time to throw our own event since nothing was really going on here in Wichita at that time. Below is the flier for the very first bboy battle/session that Wichita had seen since the 80's. It was July 1st, 2000.
There were a lot more events to come afterwards but the biggest was most likely one thrown by Paturn at Evergreen Rec. The Wichita Eagle did a full story on it. It was huge. One of the best examples of hip-hop in Wichita in that have EVER seen. There were DJ's, Bboys, local artists, and graff heads all there having fun. Below is the article that was written about the event in the paper.
In the future posts about the Wichita bboy scene I will be actually posting video from these events so be on the look out for that! Next week for Lesson 4 it's all about DJ Hard! Until then... enjoy!
@RoyceOnTheRadio
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