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About How to Break
The main characters in How to Break are teenage hip-hop dancers facing the challenges of illness. Below, find definitions to help prepare you for the story.
Sickle-Cell Disease (SCD):
SCD is an inherited blood disorder that affects over 100,000 people in the United States alone. While healthy red blood cells are round and can move through small blood vessels to carry oxygen to all parts of the body, a person with SCD has cells that become hard, sticky, and shaped like a banana, which break down easily and die early. The blockage of these broken down cells can restrict blood flow, causing pain crises of the joints, bones, chest, and stomach. The constant shortage of healthy red blood cells can cause other disorders such as jaundice and anemia.
Sickle cell disease is particularly common in people with an African or Caribbean family background. About 1 in 13 Black or African-American babies is born with the sickle cell genetic trait.
Music Therapy:
Music therapists use music to help patients through emotional, mental, and physical changes, disorders, and disabilities. Pediatric music therapists generally build a therapeutic relationship with a young patient, using music to promote healthy coping to protect the child’s mental, emotional and social well-being during inpatient and outpatient medical treatment. These therapists work to meet the needs of their patients through songwriting and improvisation – offering opportunities for self expression and communication that might not otherwise be offered in a hospital setting.
Hip-Hop:
Hip Hop culture emerged out of the late 1970’s – early 80’s in four unique elements; DJing (the musical element), MCing (the spoken element), B-boying (the movement element), and graffiti (the visual element).
Hip-Hop Dance:
Hip Hop is a style of street dance that evolved from Hip Hop culture and music originating in New York City. It encompasses a variety of dance styles, but gained notoriety from movement such as breaking, or b-boying (signified by toprock, downrock, powermoves, freezes and moving to the break of a track being played), popping (a technique of contracting and relaxing the body in jerks, hits or ticks, to the rhythm of a hip hop beat), and locking (where a dancer quickly and frequently moves their body and freezes it in place). These moves and others are performed in competitions around the world where dancers face off against each other as individuals or crews in a battle of musicality, versatility, attitude, and power.
Graffiti:
Modern Graffiti traces back to New York City, with styles ranging from bright, graphic images, or “wildstyle,” and monogram style that functions as a sort of signature, called a “tag.” One of the underlying principles for this form of art in its origin was to “get up”, or have it seen by as many people as possible, in as many places as possible, as a form of artistic expression and appreciation for Hip Hop culture. For this production of How To Break, our team collaborated with urban contemporary artist Mars, who got involved in street culture, graffiti and art at the age of 15, and was inspired by artist James Turell, whose work is “the physical presence of light made manifest in sensory form.” Together these artists have created a scenic and sensory experience as vivid and powerful as a heartbeat.