Pioneer of Break Dancing gets VH1 Award
On Oct. 16, Torres, one of the founding members of the Rock Steady Crew, which helped popularize break dancing in the late 1970s and early 1980s, was honored at program at a Manhattan dance club, Table 50, for his nearly 30 years of promoting the dance style. Torres was one of the original break dancers - or b-boys - and helped nurture it from a Bronx street phenomenon to a worldwide craze.
The dancer known as Crazy Legs, the current president of Rock Steady and a member of what Torres calls the first generation of b-boys, presented him with the heavy, silver medal other Rock Steady members received at the 2004 VH1 Hip-Hop Honors in recognition of their groundbreaking work. Torres missed the original awards ceremony because he had moved and Rock Steady members didn’t have his new telephone number.
“Everybody was saying, ‘Where’s Joe-Joe?’ ” he said. “They tried and tried to find me, but they couldn’t. I didn’t find out about (the program) until after it happened.”
He missed another awards ceremony a few weeks ago because Crazy Legs didn’t give him enough advance notice for him to get off work. Torres is an assistant chef at the Elmira Holiday Inn-Riverview.
And he almost didn’t make it to the Oct. 16 program because a friend he was counting on for a ride to New York City was in a car accident. He ended up taking a bus. Friend Corey Simpson, with whom Torres has organized b-boy events and lessons in Elmira, went with him.
Crazy Legs hosts a weekly program at Table 50 called the B-Girl Fight Club, in which dancers - in this case, women - keep alive the tradition of break dancing showdowns like the ones that made Rock Steady famous. Rock Steady’s contest with a rival crew in 1981 at Lincoln Center was covered by the mainstream press and helped make b-boying a national fad. The crew was immortalized in rappers KRS-One and Scott La Rock’s 1987 hip-hop anthem “South Bronx”:
“The Nine Lives Crew, the Cypress Boys
The real Rock Steady takin’ out these toys,
As odd as it looked, as wild as it seemed,
I didn’t hear a peep from a place called Queens ….”
Lots of men and women get involved in something when they are teenagers, then move on to other interests. Torres, though, is Rock Steady for life.
“It’s been a part of my life forever,” he said. “It’s a lifestyle. It’s part of who I am. I’m 40 years old, and I’m still a b-boy. I’m a father of four, but I’m still a b-boy.”
Part of it, he said, was the feeling he had when he danced in those competitions and everyone shouted his name. Even a street kid from the South Bronx could make a mark that, decades later, is still celebrated.
“It didn’t matter if you were poor. It didn’t matter if you had holey shoes,” he said. “You could still get that recognition.”