to think Rachel 'Raygun' gun has broken the phrase 'Oh for the confidence of a mediocre man'?

[Raygunstun]

( Ok, yes I know I am late to the party on this one).

I'm talking about the Australian women's entry into the breakdancing at the Olympics.

She went out there with absolute confidence, and complete lack of self awareness, and did really terrible breakdancing. It wasn't even really breakdancing. It was like some sort of interpretative dance. Her moves were clunky and slow. they did not flow, the connections between moves were awkward. She was like a competitor in a very, very local competition. And she appeared to have no awareness of this. I know there is a lot of creativity and expression in breaking, but it surely has to be combined with technical skill.

She also appears to have no awareness that the Olympics is about showcasing outstanding physical prowess and technical expertise. Both of which she clearly lacked.

In a way, I admire her confidence, but I don't admire her lack of awareness. I also do not believe she was the best female breaker in Australia.

Part of me feels a bit sorry for her as the break dancing world is clearly her world, but I can't help feeling she got so lost in the theory of the ' expressive' side of breaking she kinda lost sight of the technical skill side. A bit like Rachel Dolezol got so lost in the theory of race being a social construct that she lost sight of the fact you actually need to be black to be black.

Absolutely this. An article dated 11 November 2023
https://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/broadcasting/how-the-ioc-is-looking-to-engage-younger-audiences/5187838.article

I loved it it’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen I thought she was the entertainment I didn’t realise she was a competitor till after

But selfishly the UK does! Friend's DD plays at a quite senior level.

Same , it was actually hilarious and I’m loving all the memes and insta reels of it , actually has me snorting out loud laughing some are so funny.
Still wondering how she got there though.
I didn’t actually realise it was a cricket outfit she was wearing either 🤣 all the other contestants were so cool and she was like my school PE teacher from 1993 , trousers hiked up and 90’s dad trainers etc.

Her husband wasn’t one of the judges for the qualifier. That’s a bad rumour to take her down. You can actually google and find the list https://www.worlddancesport.org/Competitions/Officials/Oceania-Championship-Sydney-Adult-Breaking-1vs1-B-Girls-60318

Well nothing wrong with being nice. How do you define Olympic level for something that has never been in the Olympics before? It isn't like running at a certain speed or jumping a certain height. I can't imagine it being in the Olympics again so all the fuss will soon die down.

Just shows how false information can become the "truth" on the internet. So many have read he was the judge it is now the accepted truth. Maybe the adults need those lessons the govt want children to have about not believing everything you read.

Just wanted to add I have no idea who her husband is, could be Australian prime minister for all I know.

How did she get selected then?

Yeah, I think Oti and Motsi Mabuse and Johannes Radebe might have something to say about that.
Eminem and Macklemore can both rap well. Although it did mean a lot of w*as in the late 90s trying to emulate the former (you still get street slang/patois appropriation now with teens shouting about being top gs and using bunda and bumboclaat).
Breaking, b boying, b girling originated in the Bronx - African Americans and Puerto Ricans were the pioneers. It's not racist to point that out - it's respectful to history. It expanded to Oz, France, Japan and others. It's not cultural appropriation if you participate.
But show some respect and put the work in, for crying out loud.
Ami Yuasa did that and that's why they got the gold.

Thanks for that. A lot in that article resonates with thoughts I’ve been having.

Her husband is called Samuel Free. Someone posted the Guardian article about it. They got 15 entries, which you can also find on the site. https://www.worlddancesport.org/Competitions/Ranking/Oceania-Championship-Sydney-Adult-Breaking-1vs1-B-Girls-60318

The Guardian article says many didn’t compete because it costs money to get a passport and to join the associations needed. Australia is a big country and you have to fly and get accommodation unless you are based in Sydney. Many kiwis don’t have passports when I grew up because we don’t usually travel outside of the country. I think the small scene and the cost eliminated a lot of entries.

The one at number 2 was reusing moves according to the Guardian article. You can google their names and find Gunn has scored more than her at other competitions too.

I don't actually think that her impression of a kangaroo was at all convincing. For someone who has apparently had dance training, she seems to be utterly lacking in any kind of knowledge of rhythm, let alone breakdancing ability.

It's great shame that this has overshadowed genuinely talented competitors who showcased what breakdancing could be. It is a shame this will possibly finish it as an Olympic category. It is a shame more talented people were not chosen to represent their country, because I'm sure they exist.

Other talented b-girls probably exist in Australia. But sports cost a lot of money. I would imagine you have to fund yourselves getting to the qualifiers and likely even to Paris. Australia and NZ wouldn’t have been funding anything to do with breakdancing. Every parent who has a child doing sports that’s not football can probably tell you how much money it costs.

She's a professor of cultural studies who lectures on things like breakdancing. I think there might be more self-awareness than she lets on. And maybe there's a book in the pipeline or something.

I just read this comment on her husband's IG. Having read what other breakdancers on the Australian and US scene are saying, I think it articulates some of the issues pretty well:

You guys are Modern dancers not break dancers. That confident voice in your head telling you the world needs to know your post modern contribution to break dancing, is actually internalized white supremacy in action. Dance how you want but stop centering your style in that small scene and telling everyone that’s what break dancing is or should be! Centering yourselves this way is colonial behavior - more people need to tell you this & when they do, you need to listen

Her husbands comments are ridiculous

She's the very kind of academic who makes a career out of denouncing others for cultural appropriation or being anti-DEI but who thinks their own allyship renders them above suspicion of those crimes. Basically she's Ali G with a PhD.

This is just like when Eddie The Eagle ruined skiing forever. You never have it in the Olympics now and it's all because of him.

The foxtrot is a dance that comes from African-American culture. Aside from that, the idea that black people are innately good dancers is an uncomfortably racist one. I think the problem here is a middle class white woman muscling in on something that has meaning for working class black people, winning a qualification process that excluded people without passports (foreign travel is expensive for Australians) and may have been rigged by cronyism, and then performing in a way that was not only excruciatingly bad but also entirely lacking in any self-awareness. The sense of entitlement was off the scale. If she had been brilliant there would have been a sense of her paying tribute to another culture but she just came across as a cosplayer.

I'll just add, because they have been mentioned a few times in this thread, that most ballroom and latin dances, excluding the waltzes, either originate in or are influenced by African culture. The competitive ballroom and latin world may be very white-dominated but the dances didn't start out that way.

What comments? I thought the one @Heber posted was from someone else about Ray gun and her H?

I think it is really odd to say people can only compete in an Olympic sport if it has roots in their culture. How far does that go? So do you have to be a black male from a certain area in New York to do breakdancing? If it isn't that restricted then where do you draw the boundaries? Can women do it? Can mixed race people do it? Can black people who don't have their roots in Africa (although that one is tough as we all have our roots in Africa.) It will get really difficult I mean how about hockey? Is it English is it from more ancient stick and ball games? Is it OK for people who aren't Japanese to compete in judo?

Whatever people think about Raygun I think trying to restrict events to certain ethnicities based on where people think a sport started is going to cause utter chaos. Might be entertaining to watch the whole thing implode.

It seemed so disrespectful towards the other competitors. Her moves looked like it was a joke to her after their hard work to get to the Olympics and compete. I know she's an intelligent woman so I'm not sure what she was trying to do. I'm not sure I'd want to be a student taught by her.

You guys are Modern dancers not break dancers. That confident voice in your head telling you the world needs to know your post modern contribution to break dancing, is actually internalized white supremacy in action. Dance how you want but stop centering your style in that small scene and telling everyone that’s what break dancing is or should be! Centering yourselves this way is colonial behavior - more people need to tell you this & when they do, you need to listen

I suspect there is a lot of truth in this. That bit where Raygun is watching her opponent and gives a deliberate yawn. I know it’s about psyching your opponent out, but that was also about Raygun’s belief that other dancers are doing boring moves that she is beyond with her ‘originality’.

I flip flop between seeing her as just an over confident, deluded woman who was just excited about being ‘original’ and meant no harm and seein her on the other hand as utterly arrogant, thinking she understands breaking better than all the people who went before her, and is entitled to reshape it in her own image. I do think academics, certainly some I have known, can be like that. Utterly confident in their rightness and moral superiority and higher insight and intelligence. Maybe there is a POMO thing in this, as the quoted person above said. Maybe this is her contribution to ‘queering’ breakdancing. Who knows!

No one is saying this are they? If they are it’s very few people. There were plenty of competitors in breaking who were from non African American ethnicities, the male Australian entry was white, and no one had a problem with any of them. Because they actually respected the genre and did it well.

Ray gun has got flak mainly for being really not very good at break dancing and appearing to have no insight into this.
Some have also seen white arrogance in her apparently trying to reshape breaking into what she thinks it should be.

Thats not saying white people should not do breaking. Just that they shouldn’t hop along ( literally) on a world stage and seek to change it into something unrecognizable as breakdancing.