When you do the windmill, you roll your torso on the ground as your legs twirl through the air in a V shape. In a flare, you hold yourself up with your hands as you swing your legs around your torso, never letting them hit the ground. But if you don’t see yourself doing either of those things, you can just watch people who can at Ashes 2 Ashes: The Growing Pains World Tour in the EMU Ballroom tonight.
A breakdance battle presented by the Asian Pacific American Student Union, Ashes 2 Ashes is a tour designed to make breakdancing culture accessible through organized competition. Breakdancing, also known as breakin’ or b-boying, is a street dance style that combines rhythm, style, coordination and flexibility. In a battle, breakdancers – in crews of five at Ashes 2 Ashes – try to out-dance one another before a judge.
“The intensity is like a fight: They do anything to win a battle, they do crazy moves, they look like they’re intimidating each other. But they show a lot of sportsmanship; that’s what I find really cool,” said University sophomore Dan Lam, APASU’s office manager.

Lam, who was impressed by an Ashes 2 Ashes event he saw at Reed College in Portland last year, organized February 2007’s Breakin’ Down the EMU, the first breakdancing battle ever hosted in Eugene, which attracted more than 500 people.
“The main reason I’m doing the event again is just to help people experience more of the hip-hop and breakdancing culture because it’s just something unique (for) Eugene, something that’s different,” Lam said.
Ashes 2 Ashes is produced by Amplified Techniques, a Portland-based breakdancing crew and production group. Eugene will be the final stop on the Growing Pains World Tour; the battle’s winner will be invited to compete at next summer’s Ashes 2 Ashes World Championships in Portland.
Ian “Deejay Sugarman” Sugarman, who flew into Oregon from Tucson, Ariz. to provide music for the event said the three judges are most impressed by creativity.
“I guess first and foremost, (they’re looking for) originality and innovation because a lot of people now who can do the spectacular moves and do the acrobatic stuff – that’s great,” he said. “But the hardest thing for me in any type of art form is to build on the foundation that’s already there.”
Eight crews from Tucson to Vancouver, Wash., will be at the University tonight, though Amplified Techniques founder Huy Pham won’t say who’s competing.
Pham, who is emceeing the battle, added that because of media portrayals, the breakdancing community in general tends to be very guarded.
“At one point it was looked at as a fad, like the Razor scooter was equivalent to break dancing. It was a fad to everyone but the people who were doing it,” he said. “The dancing community is funny: It’s very, very private. Everybody holds their dances, it’s very coveted … I wanted to take a different stance on it and create an event that gave regular people a chance to experience it and appreciate it.”
Pham, who got into breakdancing as a teenager in Portland, said there’s more to breakdancing than meets the eye, namely a tremendous amount of upper-body strength to execute the moves, and enough rhythm and understanding of music to execute them properly. There’s also the diversity and sense of community, which draw Lam to the culture.
“You don’t care about other people – where they come from and the color of their skin and stuff,” Lam said. “Breakdancers build a unique relationship where they all become really close.”
Pham said, “What we don’t need is people who can see and say, ‘I can capitalize on this shit.’ For me, to have someone like Dan (Lam), who says, ‘Yo, I’m going to do this for the love. I’m going to do this so people can see it,’ I appreciate that so much.”
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