As a farewell to charming Seoul, my friends arranged tickets to attend a B-Boy show. I knew little about the experience I was walking into only we were heading to the basement of one of Seoul's myriad high rise buildings and that the premise of the show was a message about bullying.
We walked in late to a mini theatre half empty. On stage, a school scene was unfolding--nerdy kid getting bullied by the 'cool' kids. It seemed like an amateur performance put together by a troupe of university friends with lots of free time. I began to experience a wicked case of secondhand embarrassment, only second to the time we walked into the one-girl Alice in Wonderland performance where Alice was played by a Spanish girl with the world's thickest Castilian accent.
But amateur dramatics quickly unfolded into a breakdancing scene--Korean men leaped out in front of us to throw their bodies at the ground in weird angles and perform gravity-defying scenes of strength:
For the next hour and a half, we were rapt. It was a scene from the American 90s, from my high school lunchroom days and the crowd of boys who used to breakdance by the stairs. Whatever country cultivates the B-Boy as a national pastime is a country I want to be in.
As it turns out, the roots of the hobby come from the American soldiers stationed in Korea in the late 80s. But Korea has managed to morph it and turn it into something uniquely theirs. And for that, I salute them!
No B-Boy show would be complete without a closing 'Gangnam Style' number:
We were even a little bit starstruck:
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