Philly crew takes center stage at Games On! festival as breakdancing makes Olympics debut

Hip-hop dance crew Philly Surfers will celebrate the Olympic debut of breakdancing this weekend at Philadelphia’s Games On! Festival.

The Paris 2024 Olympics will look a little different than past Olympics, thanks to the inclusion of breaking as a sport.

Breaking, more commonly known as breakdancing, is an elastic style of dance whose roots can be traced back to the earliest days of hip-hop in the Bronx in 1973. 

To celebrate Breaking’s Olympic debut, local breakdancing crew the Philly Surfers will be performing during the Games On! festival this weekend at Philadelphia’s Dilworth Park, a multi-day event celebrating the city’s diverse culture through sports and art. 

Damon Holley, who dances with the Philly Surfers, has been breaking since age 15. The skill has taken the 35-year-old Philadelphia resident around the world. In 2014, he popped and locked his way through Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine on a tour with the dance company Illstyle and Peace Productions. 

Upon returning to Philadelphia, Holley formed Projective Positive, a hip-hop dance collective whose goal is to inspire at-risk youth and enrich the community through their workshops and performances.

Holley said the organization looks to provide the kind of opportunities he never had growing up as an at-risk youth in West Philly.

“It’s really dangerous for our youth (in West Philly),” Holley said. “We don’t have a lot of outlets. Dance really saved my life and kept me out of a lot of trouble. Kept me focused on my goals and kept me disciplined. It gave me a sense of brotherhood with my friends and the people who were doing the same things I was doing. I wanted to start something that gave youth the opportunities I didn’t have. I wanted to bring street dance and hip-hop dance to the masses to show what it could do to keep people off the streets and out of trouble.”

Holley and the Philly Surfers, an offshoot of Project Positive, will appear during the festival’s invite-only influencer night on Thursday, and again on Saturday at 9:00 a.m. in a performance that’s open to the public where members of the crowd can get up and learn some breakdance skills of their own. 

“We’re going to be performing, but we’re also going to be teaching people how to do what we do,” Holley said. “From basic, to intermediate, to an advanced level, we teach people young and old. We want to show people the energy that hip-hop dance brings, that breakdance brings. We want to show people that, as long as you keep surrounding yourself with positive energy, and people that are doing positive things, you’ll pick up that energy and you’ll want to do the same thing.”

Holley thinks it’s “phenomenal” that breakdancing will be featured on the international stage at the Paris Olympics for the first time. If it’s back as a sport for the 2028 Olympics and he can’t make the cut, he hopes that one of his students will. 

“I’ve got one student I’ve been teaching since he was six-years-old, and he’s now 16,” Holley said. “We were just practicing the other day and he was doing things I never taught, flips and tricks. It’s all from the energy of being around positive people doing positive things. It’s inspiring me to keep going. God willing, if I don’t get myself to the Olympics, I want to train my students to be able to go to the Olympics. It’s opened the door for our youth, giving them opportunities to pursue goals like that.”