Windmills, spins, flair and freezes – from the streets of New York City in the 1970s to the 2024 Paris Olympics, breakdancing is being celebrated in style. For example, 18 feet tall and weighing 7,000 pounds.
On Thursday, July 25, Brooklyn-based fabrication lab and innovation studio Collab unveiled its towering “Rappin’ Max Robot” statue to commemorate breakdancing’s debut at the Olympics this year. In 1986, Eric Orr created the first hip-hop comic with the help of his friend Keith Haring. The character of the same name was a symbol of the popular dance at the time-the robot was Orr. My favorite action. The sculpture will be presented to Paris and permanently preserved in Stalingrad’s Battle Square.
But before finding a new home in France, Rappin’ Max will sit for a year in front of a yet-to-open hip-hop museum in the South Bronx.
“When it gets to Paris, we’re going to embed a $50,000 speaker in the box and connect that speaker to a hip-hop museum so DJs can listen to it,” said Collab co-founder Marc Levin. Adina Levin told allergic at last week’s unveiling party. Welder Underground is an apprenticeship program launched by the studio earlier this year, using funding from US-based Swedish industrial company Elektriska Svetsnings-Aktiebolaget to build the steel giant.
Max stood in true B-Boy style with his four-fingered right hand on his hip, his left foot on the speaker, and his left elbow on his left knee. The tuning and volume dials on the giant radio are replaced by five Olympic rings, while the steel is engraved with Roman numerals “XXXIII” to commemorate the 33rd international track and field competition.
For thousands of years, the Olympics have been a testament to individual strength and athletic ability. Thanks in part to the 1983 documentary wild Exposing the underbelly of hip-hop in the South Bronx and Manhattan’s Lower East Side, break has been at the center of competitions around the world for decades and has now joined the ranks of the prestigious global competition. Although this is the first time taekwondo has entered the Olympic program, the sport was part of the 2018 Summer Youth Olympics in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
“We have to update the judging system because they used to be dancers but now they are athletes,” Victor Gabriel Alicea III, aka Kid Glyde ) said.
Alicea, a founder of the Kids Breaking League who represents Puerto Rico, will not be refereeing this year’s competition but was instrumental in creating the scoring system.
On August 9 and 10, 16 B men and 16 B women will compete for the gold medal and will be judged in five equally scored categories: vocabulary, technique, execution, originality and musicality.
At the unveiling in Brooklyn, Max wore an antenna on his head as a crowd in welding masks looked on and cheered. On the final day of the upcoming Olympics, Max will install his second antenna at 585 Outer Street in the Bronx, where he will entertain locals before moving to Paris next July — despite rumors Saying he might visit the city before he bid us farewell.
