A member of the Ohio State Bboy Club show off some of their moves. Credit: Zak Kolesar | For The Lantern
On the Ohio State Student Organizations webpage, it is listed as a club. The president of said club disagrees, calling it a crew. So what exactly is the best classification for the OSU Bboy Club?
By sitting in on one of the group’s practices, one can tell it closely resembles a family.
Kaleb Murphy, a second-year in communication and OSU Bboy Club president, is the head of said family. The group of 10 or so break dancers and artists gathers on Mondays and Wednesdays at RPAC Multipurpose Room 5 at 10:30 p.m.
It took a lot for the hip-hop cultivators to resurrect a club that dissipated a few years ago. Murphy said he was eager to lead the charge.
“I would go out to the Oval and I would bring my mat and my linoleum, play loud music and advertise the Bboy Club with a cypher,” Murphy said.
After Murphy’s crew, Flowhio, harvested enough interest among OSU students last school year, the club was finally primed to return after its evaporation in 2012.
Before becoming an established student organization at OSU, however, Murphy needed to win over the support of an adviser. Luckily, mathematics adviser Austin Mack said he understood the deep passion that the OSU Bboy Club has for the culture.
“It’s been very apparent that they’ve been very active and driven,” Mack said.
Few words are said between the members at the meetings because their animated dancing provides the dialogue. Practice starts when a 3-foot amplifier begins spitting out tunes.
“I don’t have to say a single word, but as soon as I get down, they already know who I am,” former OSU student and Bboy Club member Riky Ouk said. “They can just look at me, and that’s the beauty of it.”
Members of the Ohio State Bboy Club show off some of their moves. Credit: Zak Kolesar | For The Lantern
As of right now, the club seems very stationary. Members have been traveling around the Midwest for the past year or so gaining knowledge of breakdancing competitions thrown by other colleges in hopes of bringing back an old OSU Bboy Club tradition.
The club hopes to host an event called Smoked in Ohio at Dance614 in Powell, Ohio, at the end of the spring semester. The format will be a crew-on-crew battle with a $1,500 grand prize.
While the club has its main focus right now on Smoked in Ohio and performing at Taste of OSU in February, another priority for the breakdancing crew is to continue bringing more students into the culture. That starts by educating prospective members that breakdancing is a subculture, so other artistic abilities can be shared within the OSU Bboy Club.
“There is still a fairly huge subculture of hip-hop that is actually into its roots like graffiti, DJing, emceeing, knowledge, breaking,” Murphy said. “And that’s actually a huge part of the breaking scene because a lot of breakers are also people who do (graffiti) and do write.”
The OSU Bboy Club does not want to limit its membership. The current members said they want OSU students to know that it is a group for fostering talent and for artists who have unconditional love for their specific craft.
“Hip-hop is the one last chance for the human race to unite,” Ouk said.
