There are many wrong ways to start an interview. You can get your interviewee’s name wrong, spill coffee all over them or accuse them of leaving you and your fellow reporters waiting for four hours over two days, to be then ejected out of the hotel suite by a burly bodyguard.
Another one is to inadvertently accuse your interviewee that his or her all-consuming passion is just a hobby. Multiply that by six, and you’re in my shoes as B-Boy crew Maltese Knights sit down on the parquet floor at a Żabbar gym for their interview.
“Playing video games is a hobby!” Matthew Saliba, one of the dancers, protests.
“This is a lifestyle, it’s not something you just dip into,” Elton Gialanze, the youngest in the crew pipes in.
Charline Grange, the only BGirl on the team, elaborates: “It’s my full-time, part-time job. It’s meant to be a part-time, but I’ve invested a lot in it.”
The aim of hip hop was to unite people from different gangs
The investment includes time and money in a lifestyle which has waned in recent years: from 10 crews, Malta now has only four, and the Maltese Knights crew was founded as a home to the orphans of defunct teams.
“The energy started dwindling, people ended up training on their own or in really small groups, so we decided we’d create something new and unite those who were still at it,” Liston Bongailas says.
But could it be because breakdance was imported into Malta without the cultural baggage to underpin it, that it has waned so much in popularity? Unsurprisingly, this too ruffled a few feathers among the crew, until Jerome Seychell, also a DJ, intervenes.
“I know what he means,” he tells his teammates. “What he’s saying is that it started in America as a result of a certain lifestyle. We’re absorbing the dance element of it, but the bigger umbrella is hip hop.”
He turns to explain: “The aim of hip hop was to unite people from different gangs, and it was this energy that united everyone. There was this organisation, Zulu Nation, that started hip-hop, and its slogan was peace, love and having fun, and a lot of elements sprung out of that. I DJ, too, you get MCs, graffiti... all of these are part of the culture, and they were elements which united people.
“One of the things I like most is that when you are abroad, you are dancing and everyone’s speaking the same language.”
The name brings about the notion of battles, and these prove to be a wellspring of drive and inspiration for the local crew, which tries to thrive in a culture where dancers in their genre have no one to look up to, and no one to compete with. Their next international foray is due on January 25, when they participate in the Italian qualification leg for the international Floor Wars breakdance competition in Brescia.
“In Malta you can get tired and demotivated because of the scene, but then you go abroad, and feel that hype and energy. We meet people who are competing all year round, and when we come back we bring that energy and pass it on to the dancers we ourselves train. With that energy, we start focusing on weak points and work to improve, and then go back again to get better,” Bongailas says.
The international competitions, where blows and punches are replaced with freezes and spins, are not the only battle local breakdancers have to face, with harder obstacles to face at home. With no real breakdance or hip hop culture to support a thriving scene, the few breakdancers that remain have to organise all their events, find their own venues and fund their own trips, with no organisational support and very little people to depend on.
It was harder for people who first started dancing in this style. Clint Camilleri, 30 years old and the oldest in the crew, had no one to learn from when he started.
“When I was starting out, the internet was in its early stages, and you used to have to wait a whole morning for a three-second video to download. We used to get the Italian equivalent for MTV – TMC2 – and watched music videos there. You’d catch a move on the video, you’d record it and re-watch it over and over again. That’s how it started in Malta. Then the internet came in, and we got more help,” Camilleri says.
For the rest, they depend on each other’s support and input during their long training sessions, and on watching foreign crews dance in competitions they take part in.
“Because of the size of our country, the breakdance culture reached a certain point and then a lot of people dropped out. When we go out there, it’s like we’ve been closed in our own bubble and we’ve suddenly opened up to something much larger,” Seychell says.
To make matters worse, some of the dancers who had helped pioneer the style in Malta quit, leaving the current generation rudderless. This is something they try to make up for with their current batch of students. Grange estimates she teaches around 130 children how to breakdance, starting from child-ren aged three and four. Having started quite late herself, she envies the rapid progress her own pupils make.
“In three months they’ve covered what I did in three years,” she says.
“Our role models have quit. We have to take care of our generation because our predecessors abandoned the culture. So we’re trying to raise the next generation as much as we can so they keep us moving forward.
You need more people in order to make the thing you love grow,” Grange says.
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