Hello bboys/bgirls and everyone who supports breakin, hip hop and the Tranquil Productions community. I am so excited to bring you this latest breakin blog post, which is a celebration of my time at Kala Sangam. I was awarded a grant from Kala Sangam, which is a Bradford organisation that specialises in the arts and supporting Bradford’s artists and communities through their arts centre. Thanks to their amazing team and the ‘Back to the Studio’ programme myself and the Clean North Crew have been able to return to a regular indoor space to train professionally, get back on our feet and sharpen our skills.
In this post you will be able to see a new promo I filmed using new techniques, with the help of bgirl Fox, showing my return to training. You will also see some amazing shots taken by Karol Wyszynski, these were from a photoshoot which was included in the grant.
Thank God I was selected to be one of the artists involved, as I was also able to help others benefit also. I personally had not been able to train regularly for almost 10 months and any training that had taken place was mostly outdoors which was difficult during winter. At the start of 2020 I had in mind to celebrate 20 years of breakin at a later point that year but not many of us could imagine, what was to come.
In terms of breakin over the last year I tried to maintain my skills and enjoy dance where possible. My main priority was for the Bradford community of breakers and the international breakin scene, keeping a light shining for everyone through hip hop culture and my work as the director of Tech Styles International. I was incredibly blessed to run successful projects such as Tech Styles Digital during the lockdowns and it was great to see the joy and happiness it brought to so many breakers across the world including myself.
Working on these digital projects was amazing but I missed dancing a lot and spending quality time with my crew. Clean North is one of the UK’s longest standing active breakin crews formed in 2002, although we are a professional breakin crew, we are also like a family spending lots of social time together, we are used to meeting 2-3 times a week and training as a collective. Not being able to meet together regularly for 10 months was a complete lifestyle change for us all, however being able to share this recent gift of returning to a beautiful studio on a regular basis has been incredible.
Some other great news that is linked to our recent training, is that me & bboy Stylez have qualified in the Top 8 for a worldwide online event hosted from Tromsø, Norway called Arctic Jam. Kala Sangam have decided to further support us and have given us access to use there building for the live event. We will be battling online live, Saturday the 24th of April at 6pm UK time, so be sure to give us your support and love as we are the only crew representing England, If we win this battle we will be flown out to Norway for an event later this year. Here is the link to their YouTube Channel for the event ARCTIC JAM Coming into this battle we decided to represent our love for the dance, our crew (Clean North), our city (Bradford) and ourselves. This is what is most important and we will carry that through the event no matter what the outcome. We are both grateful and thankful to God everyday for this dance given to us.
This year has been like a breath of fresh air thanks to Kala Sangam’s programme, helping artists like myself get back to what we do best. It feels like a new energy has formed and it has brought me lots of happiness to know we have a consistent place to train. I have to thank Alex Croft and Alex Corwin for their help organising these sessions, also Ifty and the onsite facilities team Mo & Dave for always being so helpful every time we have visited the building, plus all the members of Kala Sangam that helped to make this possible. I have to thank God that there are organisations in Bradford like Kala Sangam, helping people and are opening their doors to help artist recover.
