Spinning, flipping and flaring across the polished floor of Severance Hall’s Grand Foyer, 24-year-old Esita Calhoun’s acrobatic finesse and skill was on full display this summer at Cleveland’s third annual Lords of the Land street dance festival.
“Once you see it, like, I don’t even know how to explain it,” said Calhoun. “I wouldn’t even know words to explain it. It’s like you feel it in your chest, seeing someone break. It’s just electrifying.”
Originally from Dayton but now based in Cleveland, Calhoun is a b-girl and choreographer who works under the name Bgirl Flyya.
“A b-girl stands for break girl, or as the media calls it, breakdancing, but it’s actually called breaking,” Calhoun said. “And it’s when a dancer would get down to the breaks of the song. Like the break in the music.”
Breaking is having a moment, both in advance of its debut inclusion on the world stage at the 2024 Olympics and as hip-hop celebrates its 50th anniversary. While there’s anticipation and optimism about what the Paris spotlight will look like and mean for the future, there’s also a concern that breaking hasn’t been given its due with regards to the past as one of the four pillars of hip-hop, along with deejaying, emceeing and graffiti.
“A lot of organizations are missing the four elements. They just do the music or they do the graffiti. But what about the dance aspect? Who’s dancing on the floor?” Samuel McIntosh told Scene. “It’s always the breakers holding it down. It’s always the dancers creating that movement and that energy.”
McIntosh is the founder and executive director of 10K Movement, an organization that teaches street dancing and aims to present, preserve and cultivate the culture in Cleveland, including with partnerships with nine CMSD schools. It’s also the organization behind Lords of the Land, the annual workshop and dance battle competition that hosted its third event this year.
As the culture prepares for the megablast of worldwide exposure, and wonders how the official competition will or won’t differ from the organic artform berthed in New York in the early 1970s, McIntosh and Calhoun have a more immediate focus: growing the scene in Cleveland, which has long lagged behind its Midwestern counterparts as a home for breaking.
2023 marked a big milestone for hip hop, as institutions like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame celebrated its history.
Hip-hop education and cultural preservation is very much on the mind of McIntosh.
“A lot of people forget that this is also American folk music and American folk dance and American folk art – street dance culture – and what that actually means and what hip hop actually is,” he told Scene.
In addition to hosting events, 10K Movement partners with nine schools in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District to teach not only dance, but the pillars, influence and history of hip hop.
Beyond 10k Movement’s involvement in Cleveland schools, McIntosh also teaches at Kent State and Baldwin Wallace. He himself got an education in hip hop from a mentor and fellow dancer who gave him the moniker “10K.”
“He was a popper, but also he was in residency at the Cleveland Clinic,” said McIntosh. “So he was a brain surgeon, but he was also a popper. Nobody else was really teaching real hip hop classes. It was mainly like choreography, and nobody was really teaching the history.”
They met one day when McIntosh was dancing in a park and the two clicked.
“I’d go over to his house and we’d train from like 11 [p.m.] to like 3 a.m. And we did this for about three years,” McIntosh said. “He gave me the name 10K as a dance name. You know, if you put 10,000 hours into anything you become a master, are proficient at your craft, and he gave me the Malcolm Gladwell book Outliers.”
Eager to share his passion for authentic hip hop culture in Cleveland, the title 10K inspired the name of McIntosh’s organization.
“I was like, ‘Well, I don’t want to just be 10K. I think everybody involved can be 10K,’” said McIntosh. “The organization, we want it to act as a platform for Cleveland, specifically, or really for the Midwest.”
Although the Midwest is alive with the culture, it isn’t often recognized for its hip hop scene.
“I could go to New York and LA, they are definitely their own beasts,” said McIntosh. “They are the mecca when it comes to the industry, or the scene of street dance. But when it comes to the Midwest, I think a lot of the time we’re overlooked in the street dance community.”
Earlier this year, McIntosh traveled to Japan for the Old School Night tournament. As a dancer, teacher, choreographer and self-proclaimed hip hop ambassador, he’s visited street dance and hip hop festivals around the country and even internationally.
“I think a lot of the time you look at some other cities and what they’re doing with the dance culture aspect, from the battles to education – even just some of the performances and stuff – it’s just the infrastructure is already set up,” McIntosh said. “Whereas, in Cleveland, I do think we are so far behind where people think about hip hop, they just think about the studio classes, and they don’t know the essence of what’s actually happening.”
The most prestigious and well-known street dance competitions and events in the Midwest aren’t hosted in Ohio.
But 10K Movement’s mission is to change that, which started with the launch of Lords of the Land in 2021.
“You go to Chicago, they have a great infrastructure when it comes to events, like when Red Bull does their dancer-style events, but I think people are surprised when you say, ‘Cleveland has a street dance scene and it’s growing and we have a lot of things going on,’” said McIntosh.
Lords of the Land uses a standard street dance competition format: dancers compete one-on-one in a bracket-style competition in front of three judges. Each judge votes either for a competitor or a tie and, after a tie-breaker if needed, the winner advances.
Competition is open to all ages, and in the three years so far, Lords of the Land has had entries from dancers as young as five and as old as 88.
In 2021, the inaugural Lords of the Land was held in the middle of Downtown in Public Square and featured three categories of street dance: popping, open style and krump. The outdoor venue helped garner attention for the festival from passersby.
“We really activated that space,” McIntosh said. “We had our stage right there on Superior Ave. and probably a thousand people passed by like, ‘What’s happening?’ So that’s kind of how we opened the floodgates.”
The next year, Lords of the Land took inspiration from Summer Dance Forever, an internationally renowned Dutch street dance festival with competitions in Paradiso, a major Amsterdam music venue. To bring that vibe to Cleveland, Lords of the Land moved inside to Severance Hall in 2022 and 2023.
“Anytime you think about street dance events or battles in the United States, they’re just not up to par with what’s going on internationally,” McIntosh said. “So I wanted to bring a piece of that [to Cleveland].”
This year’s battle hosted judges from the United States, Canada and South Korea. Ahead of the 2024 Olympic Games, the festival featured breaking for the first time, as well as hip hop and popping.
After two days of workshops, roughly 100 dancers entered the preliminary competitions for each category. After fierce competition, only 24 dancers advanced to the battle the next day. In between showcases from the judges and performances from students of 10k Movement’s Summer Street Dance Intensive, dancers went head-to-head in four rounds of battles.
The winners of all three categories travel for tournaments and come from outside Ohio.
Classically trained in ballet and modern dance, Los Angeles-based Hans Pierre took home top honors in the hip hop category.
“Hip hop is definitely self-expression,” Pierre said. “I’d say the core of hip hop, for me, is taking very little and making crazy things – creating opportunities and joy and forms of self-expression without a bunch of resources. I would definitely say that it’s built for people that have a struggle or have something to say.”
Patrick “Genocide” Paredes returned for his second run at Lords of the Land in 2023. Paredes earned his unique stage name after facing off against another crew by himself.
“It was supposed to be a crew battle but my crew didn’t really like the music being played and they didn’t want to throw their round, so I just kind of kept going over and over again,” Paredes said. “By the end my friend was like, ‘that was like watching someone commit mass genocide.’”
Paredes is based in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, but has traveled to compete around the Midwest, East Coast and Canada for the last decade.
The festival’s first ever breaking champion was Brandon “No Cents” McCrimmon. Hailing from North Carolina, McCrimmon has been breaking for nearly two decades. He describes his dancing style as “energy” and prides himself on personalizing his moves.
“I add my DNA when I do this dance,” said McCrimmon. “Therefore, it becomes self when I’m out there.”
Largely self-taught, Cleveland-based Esita Calhoun learned the six-step – breaking’s foundational sequence where a dancer supports themself with their arms and moves their legs in a circle – from a friend in a Wushu martial arts class. Calhoun was immediately hooked and set out to learn more the way every kid did in 2010: YouTube.
With a background in Wushu and tumbling, Calhoun quickly took to breaking and has been practicing, teaching and competing ever since. It was Calhoun’s breaking that brought her to Cleveland after she was scouted by the Cavaliers’ Scream Team through social media.
She spent four years with the Scream Team, first as a member, then as a captain. While on the team, she was introduced to 10K Movement. She’s now a part of 10k Elite, a group of street dance professionals within the organization.
“We’re a group of professional dancers and we go around Cleveland and we perform, and we also teach in the Cleveland area,” said Calhoun. “And we’re just representing hip hop and teaching street dance, and we’re teaching the history of it, along with the proper technique and foundation. People pick it up and we just fall in love with it and just represent.”
Although she didn’t qualify for Team USA ahead of the Paris Olympics, Calhoun made it to the top 16 at Nationals and she’ll be eagerly watching to see what happens next year.
For comparison sake, breaking was introduced in the 2018 Summer Youth Olympics and drew millions of views online.
McCrimmon, the inaugural breaking champ at Lords of the Land, believes the games will have an impact similar to the representation of breaking in street dance movies.
“I think that breaking coming to the Olympics is going to be very monumental, like how breaking first hit the big screen back in the day… it hit everybody,” McCrimmon said.
But for McCrimmon, that excitement comes with a caveat.
“The only thing is the leaders of the community need to make sure that they ground themselves and be the main people that help cultivate and shape it the way that it needs to be shaped, because there will be some people that we consider ‘culture vultures’ that will come in and try to capitalize on it in ways that should not be done.”
Regardless, McIntosh and 10K Movement will continue spurring the action in town, hoping to build momentum while paying homage to street dancing’s roots.
“When we look at hip hop culture, if we’re not hitting every aspect, especially in the 50th year, then I think we’re missing the boat,” he said, “especially in Cleveland with such a rich history.”
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This article appears in Nov 8-21, 2023.