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Breakin’ Convention: The Pioneers: Mr Wiggles

Words: David Barros

Images: Belinda Lawley

"I trained with Mr Wiggles" isn’t something a lot of people can say, and something many people in the UK don't often get to do without having to travel overseas. Large hip hop events in Europe and America get the creme of the originators from the old school, while hip hop fans in the UK need to book a flight to see their all-time greats - then pay a class fee on top of that!

Lucky for us, however, a last minute chance taken by the Breakin' Convention team allowed fans of hip hop dancing to have the opportunity to train with one of the most authentic cats in hip hop.

Mr Wiggles was in London earlier in October to judge the locking and popping for the UK B-Boy Championships, and had been scheduled in to be the first of three practitioners for Breakin' Convention's Pioneers courses.

The Pioneers course is an intensive week-long workshop for professional dancers and teachers to learn the foundation skills of popping, locking, and breaking with the original dancers from the era.

Unless you're a full-time practitioner who would benefit from taking the pricey week-long workshops, training with Wiggles might have been a bit out of the price range of the average dancer. At short notice, however, about a week before, it was announced that while Mr Wiggles would be doing the Pioneers master classes throughout the day, and would also be hosting additional evening sessions too, priced at a reasonable £14.

An outstanding example of Wiggles’ ability

Boogaloo

The week started with a boogaloo and popping workshop on Wednesday. Who wouldn't want to do a popping workshop with Mr Wiggles? He's a member of the Electric Boogaloos and his style and finesse of movement is unparalleled.

Boogaloo is a style more advanced than popping, so rather than drilling the technique in to us, we were taught the routine first, and the technique after. The routine wasn't too hard, and Wiggles' teaching style was laid back (he was sipping a bottle of Beck's beer!), but no matter how hard I tried, there's no way I could make myself look like him!

So happy was I with the workshop that I decided to return for the rest of the week!

Mr Wiggles boogaloo footage

Mr Wiggles Q&A

Thursday night was a Q&A night, hosted by DJ Billy Bizness, aka, The Janitor, in Sadler’s Wells’ lecture theatre. Mr Wiggles packs more knowledge about hip hop than you'd ever imagined!

Taking it all the way back to the origins of hip hop, Mr Wiggles went beyond old school, educating the audience on how it started before Kool Herc, back in the fifties and sixties, where African and Latino families partied in the street together, combining music to make a completely new sound.

I thought I would be the only one attending that brought a notepad, but there were people sitting with notepads all around me paying close attention.

Overall the session was two hours long and resulted in pages of notes, but here are a few facts you might not have know about hip hop culture:

Mr Wiggles' writing (graffiti) name was Wreck.
The B in b-boy does stand for Bronx boy - it’s widely disputed. It comes from when breakers came to Manhattan, people would mutter "there go those Bronx boys again..."
Boogaloo is an Afro-Cuban word originating from an East African word meaning 'devilishly good.' The original boogaloo dance had nothing to do with popping or electric boogaloo.
Toprocking was called Indian Styles, after the Native Indian steps used.
Rubberband, an original rocker from the Bronx, introduced the jerk you see in the uprock. It was meant to look like he was undoing his belt and taking his trousers off.

Bronx Social Dance Night

Friday's class was very different from the typical class. The theatre in the Lilian Bayliss was cleared to make space for the dance floor, complete with disco lights for the Bronx social party night.

I guarantee you will never see anything like the party vibe that night. The first 15 minutes was nothing but letting people get down to the music. When the session got underway Mr Wiggles acted as MC demonstrating a single step, then gave the party time to freestyle the move and add their own flavour. And then?

"Some b-boys are scared of dancing with girls!" Partner dances are completely different to what you do in night clubs these days. No close grinding, these were based on dances from the fifties, sixties and seventies. Lindy hop, salsa - think of it like the social scene in West Side Story.

Out of all the Pioneers sessions, this was the most important night above all the others in terms of highlighting a cause. In the Q&A, Mr Wiggles spoke about how community was such an important factor to a lot of these dance styles, and the social dancing demonstrated just that.

The fact the community mentality of being able to dance and socialise has been lost speaks a lot about how society has changed and how we don’t respect each other the same way older generations did, and yet everyone had a fun time without the pressure of being embarrassed about dancing with someone you’ve just met - it broke down social barriers.

As Mr Wiggles is a popper by profession it was custom that the DJ played a popping set. DJ Pogo spun the records, while Mr Wiggles called out the names moves. Considering there hadn't been an evening workshop dedicated to popping, it was a case of monkey see, monkey do, with moves some people didn't know. Eventually everyone caught up, and seeing an entire room of people doing the twist-o-flex and Egyptian styles in synchronisation was something very cool to watch!

Toprocking

Finally, Saturday night and everyone was exhausted from all the training in unfamiliar techniques. An evening of the toprocking was ahead with the original steps broken down to their foundations, and keeping the element of the rock present.

Once again, this wasn't a difficult class, but the sort of class where you learn the history of the move, as well as Mr Wiggles playing some rare soul records to demonstrate the diversity of the music from the era before funk became the style of music to break to.

To see b-boys like Lil Tim who have been around for a while grabbing their iPhones to record what Mr Wiggles had to say during the breaks showed just what an influence Mr Wiggles has had on b-boying.

And so the evening classes came to a close ending a week that truly opened my already wide eyes about the unknown parts of hip hop dancing history some people have forgotten about.

Mr Wiggles was, despite his worldwide fame, incredibly humble, which probably made a lot of people that met him over the week even more grateful to have learnt from him.

Now, with the first of three planned Pioneers weeks finished, I can only wait in anticipation for the next: Tony Gogo and Ken Swift, coming next year!

This feature is part of our Breakin’ Convention section

Click here to go to the main Breakin’ Convention section

Video:

You might have missed the Mr Wiggles Q&A, but we found this video which touches on some of the things he talked about. Click to play.

Related features:

Blog: Mr Wiggles in Sesame Street

Report: UK B-Boy Championships 2009