This piece was first published in The Saturday Paper almost a fortnight ago. Oddly, it did well. Oddly, because within 48 hours of Raygun’s memorable performance, the public’s appetite for pieces about it had been more than satisfied. But here it is, for those who’ve asked…
It’s amazing how quickly one can pass from obscurity to global infamy. The threshold can be crossed in just minutes: one moment you’re an amateur breaker and domestic novelty, the next the internet’s crowded plazas are obsessed with you and you’re material for Adele’s onstage banter.
So it was for Dr Rachael “Raygun” Gunn, Australia’s only female breaker in Paris, who danced with such powerfully comic ineptitude that half the world could rationalise the performance only by wondering if it was a private joke or some mysteriously elaborate form of sabotage. “Turns out Rachael Gunn here has a PhD in cultural studies, with a speciality in the gender politics of movement and breakdance,” Hannah Berrelli, a feminist writer, wrote in an enthusiastically shared tweet. “She has written about how including break dance in the Olympics changes it from a practice within an alternative subculture, to a hegemonic one that incorporates the dance into what she sees as Australia’s settler colonialist project. I am 100% certain what she is doing here, in wearing the Australia kit even, is trying to make some subversive point she can later write journal articles about.”
It’s a heavy thing to become the subject of global ridicule, and presumably disorienting when it happens as quickly as a scrub fire caused by lightning. Yet it would be inhuman to pretend that this wasn’t hysterically funny. Or globally captivating. Around the world, Raygun was discussed more than Simone Biles, Steph Curry or the Fox sisters. Mocked by Ricky Gervais and defended by politicians, Raygun was suddenly very famous.
Like everyone else, I’d casually pondered the wisdom or appropriateness of including breaking in the Olympics. Not for the reasons Raygun cited last year, in the academic journal Global Hip Hop Studies, that “with sport in Australia connected to a kind of idealized settler-colonial masculinity, the introduction of breaking as a ‘sport’ in many ways complicates this construction”, but because squash has never been included.
Still, there are dancing horses and artistic swimming, and many of those breakers were damn impressive. In fact, most transformed themselves into human spinning tops and implausibly elegant pretzels. Alas, it was their fate to have their athleticism serve merely as comic contrast to Raygun’s performances, which variously resembled the writhing of a captured eel, a toddler’s rebellion against sleepy-time, and a drunk’s attempt to quietly enter the bed of their partner at 4am after having promised an early one.
There’s a popular theory that this was an elaborate jest, an act of mischievous culture jamming. The inclusion of breaking in the Olympics was unique and controversial and obliged the sudden organisation of qualifiers for a “sport” that didn’t consider itself one and that had little to no institutional or commercial support. Which is as many wanted: this was street art, originating in the Black boroughs of New York City, a form whose corruption would be ensured by its adoption by the International Olympic Committee.
It was an old question of selling out, but the debate also smacked of an absurd redundancy: breaking doesn’t mean much anymore in the country of its origin, it’s no longer really considered one of the “pillars” of hip-hop, and was largely ignored during various celebrations of the musical genre’s 50th anniversary last year. To defend the sanctity of breaking when its ostensible custodians have abandoned it seems vaguely embarrassing to me.
One unusually popular argument goes that Raygun – who holds a PhD after submitting a thesis called “Deterritorializing Gender in Sydney’s Breakdancing Scene” – was sufficiently aggrieved by the Olympics’ appropriation of breaking that she sought to sabotage its future inclusion by ensuring it became virally mocked. It was the weird work of a kamikaze cultural guerrilla – or an academic keen to having something to write about.
It’s an astonishing reflection of one’s performance that many simply could not attribute it to earnest ineptitude, and had to imagine it as an intricate form of protest. Having spoken to Raygun for an hour in the weeks before Paris, I will testify to her sincerity. “Just because [younger dancers] come out with a youthful spirit and spin really fast and have all the energy in the world, doesn't mean that they're going to beat the 40-year-old who has the maturity and the know-how and artistry to be able to, you know, perform a really well constructed round,” she told me.
If we remove elaborate mischief as an explanation, then we’re left with two options: heroic indifference to one’s inability or a tragic obliviousness to it.
Gunn explained to me the five elements of breaking that are subject to adjudication and expressed frustration that judges, in the past, had emphasised technicality over one’s individuality and improvisation. “I think these big international competitions, some of these ones that I’ve been going to over these past few years, they’re pretty disheartening when you fly all that way and then you don't even make it past prelims, and you don’t think your round was that bad,” she said.
“It gets a little bit frustrating sometimes, because breakers talk a lot about the importance of artistry, the importance of originality and bringing something new. But then so often their judging decisions don’t reflect that. And it can just be quite frustrating to see that happen … I think that’s because creativity and originality is such an important aspect for me.”
I had assumed that Raygun’s frustration here was really a matter of degrees. That the 32 b-boys and b-girls who entered the Olympics were the cream of global talent and that each roughly shared the same core competencies, expressed with subtly different ability and personal flair.
Obviously not. Raygun’s frustration with the priorities of past judges now assumed fresh significance: she didn’t possess any core competency and was annoyed that judges couldn’t acknowledge her heroic eccentricity.
That’s fine. The simple and polite thing here would be to accept Raygun’s admission to the canon of Olympians whose earnestness was unmatched by ability but who hurt no one and had a great time doing it: Raygun may now join Eddie the Eagle, Eric the Eel and the Jamaican bobsled team.
Sure, but then I read her academic papers, the ones leaden with phrases like “embodied knowledge” and “analytic autoethnography” and which bizarrely assert that “sport in Australia is largely a middle-class White affair, with institutions structured in a way that privileges and excludes particular people and backgrounds”, which will come as a surprise to any NRL fan.
I also read quotes of breathless grandiosity, like “Breaking provides an opportunity to explore the ‘faster, higher, stronger’ ethos of the Olympics in new ways. It shows us that we truly don’t know every point on which the body can spin or launch its weight, the different shapes it can make, or all the ways it can move”, which offered an interesting counterpoint to footage of her mopping the stage with her cap.
So, at risk of cruelty, I feel compelled to record several things. One, that the comedic archetype was realised here in real life: the person tragically unaware of their own limitations. Two, that if we pretend otherwise, then we suffer psychic constipation. Three, that the judging of Olympic performance, much like the literacy standards of children, should not be dependent on “vibes” or bizarre generosity but upon accepted standards. Finally, perhaps a royal commission into departmental cultural studies wouldn’t be such a bad idea.
Cruel, sure, but we must make choices. My choice here is to assume the importance of ridiculing pomposity – even if others may see heroic commitment. Let Raygun serve as a cultural Rorschach test.
At the end of our conversation, Gunn expressed surprise that I hadn’t asked her about “white appropriation”. I’d thought about it, not because I personally felt any injustice but because I’d read previous interviews where she’d spoken about her sense of guilt. I’m always interested in how people rationalise themselves, but as a matter of personal interest, Raygun’s sense of political sin ranks for me with Lena Dunham condemning her old college cafeteria for including sushi on the lunch menu.
Gunn nominated the topic, however. Perhaps this was part of her strange plot of guerrilla warfare, but I think it was sincere – that is, she wanted to confess her sins of white appropriation and talk about her penance, which included her campaigning against the New South Wales prohibition of school students practicing breakdancing. “I try and use my platform to advocate for hip-hop, for breaking, I think, particularly. I'm trying to get this ban on New South Wales schools lifted,” she said. “I don’t like the fact that the only way that you can begin to learn breaking is in studios, that’s the way to ensure it’s only accessible to rich white kids.”
Now to prohibit kids in high schools from doing what Raygun did seems perfectly reasonable, given that any emulation would likely result not in a broken neck but social ostracism.
“There are worse things than dancing,” I told Raygun, “and be gentle on yourself.” And I meant it – but there are few things funnier to me than confessions of white guilt strained through academia. “[My breaking is] something that I constantly reflect upon and am constantly going, ‘What am I doing? Is this right? Should I be doing this?’ ”
Well, that depends upon who you speak to. “Gunn’s performance was a modern-day minstrel show,” wrote the Black American writer Stacey Patton, “where cultural appropriation masqueraded as athleticism, and the world was invited to laugh at the crude distortion of a cultural expression once demonised because it originated with Black urban youth.”