Ana Garcia, best known as Lady Rokafella or B-Girl Rokafella, has never backed down from addressing situations that others were uncomfortable with.
“People are so much more aware of mental health now, but for so long, we used to have to take things on the chin and keep moving. There wasn’t a space for men to talk about these things and people didn’t want to deal with women or crying,” she described. “The feeling was,
‘You want to hang out with the big boys? Then you better have thick skin.’”
Breaking and Breaking Barriers
Although she is now a legendary breaker who co-founded a hip-hop dance theater Full Circle Dance Company (with her husband Gabriel “Kwikstep” Dionisio) and directed/produced a documentary film about b-girls (“All the Ladies Say”), Rokafella didn’t start her dance career breaking. “I was watching and absorbing all hip-hop dance, getting caught up in the beauty and strength of it all. Eventually, I wanted that same kind of power I saw in breaking, to show the world that I had that strength and intellect to be a breaker. It takes a lot to study, to try something, fail, try again, fail, and then succeed,” she recalled. “I was watching it all. In Harlem and the Bronx, it was just happening. I was lucky to witness it and to absorb it.”
She came into the dance scene ready and confident, but others were not as ready to embrace her, particularly because it was such a male-dominated scene. “I spent quite a few years in street dance and club dancing before I was breaking, so I knew what it was like to jump into a space of mostly men. When it was my turn, I knew what I wanted to do in the cypher and at the clubs,” she stated. “When I came into breaking, I had something of a chip on my shoulder. I worked hard and went in with a mindset that I was going to be paid my respect. That stood out from a lot of other women who were coming up and new to interacting with me in a circle.”
That strength was formed out her hard work, but also painful experiences. “I had danced at hip hop parties downtown and some interactions weren’t too positive. Some guys wanted me out of there, while others thought it was okay to grab me and touch me. Many were talking about sexuality and sexual things, but that wasn’t what I was there for, and it wasn’t what I came to do,” Rokafella pointed out. “I caught a lot of guys off-guard with my attitude and self-confidence.”
Kwikstep was one man not turned off or intimidated by her self-assured ability. “I was insistent on learning the history and the music. He was bringing me around his colleagues, his peers, and his teachers. They noticed that I picked things up quickly, that I would work at what they were teaching. The next time they saw me, I had the move. Teachers love that,” commented Rokafella, who has been teaching for many years.
“(Kwikstep’s) support helped me to continue forward even though some guys didn’t know how to deal with my energy,” she continued. “Another issue we had as women in breaking is that we were spread out in New York, San Francisco and other cities in California, and Chicago, so we couldn’t pow-wow. Even the one other woman breaker in the Bronx wasn’t close to me. We couldn’t compare notes and ideas. She was amazing, but we didn’t have that feeling of solidarity until sometime later.”
Breaking Through, and Embracing, Cultural Values
“When I first said I wanted to be a dancer, my family told me not to do it. They told me, ‘You will make no money, be a starving artist, and you will ask us for money.’ There is a negative connotation, especially in a Puerto Rican or Latin family, about being an artist,” she explained. “My parents came to New York City from Puerto Rico where they both had land. “When the agricultural economy was destabilized, my dad came here in the 1950s and then brought my mom here in the ‘60s. They worked really hard between manual labor, driving a cab, and working in a factory.”
Rokafella said the dichotomy of being U.S. citizens, but then being viewed as immigrants was a struggle for her parents. “Sometimes, as Puerto Ricans, we are not seen as citizens. My dad did not speak English when he got here, so as a Spanish-speaking person, he was seen as an immigrant. Things are tough as an immigrant,” she noted. “They were struggling to pay bills and then I was saying I wanted to be a dancer. To do that in our culture was like we were disrespecting all our parents did for us. They sacrificed so much in the hopes that we would be able to pay our bills, to take care of both our parents and our kids.”
She has witnessed the erasure of LatinX dancers from the stories of the origins of hip-hop dance. “Hip-hop dance was created from an African root of jazz and rock & roll that was shared with African descendants, including those who are LatinX. Even in the beginning, dark-skinned LatinX people were not considered to be Latin, yet they were pioneers who lived here and just got down at the start of hip-hop,” she commented. “We have been kind of removed from the original formula, but we still show up. Those who are open-minded embrace our community. We see a lot of Puerto Rican or Dominican people finding it harder to stay true to their roots the way that many Jamaican or West Indian people in New York do.”
Breaking’s Popularity Decline and Resurgence
“Those of us in dance knew that breaking and hip-hop dance were one, but breakers got left behind and set aside commercially. People began talking about breaking and hip-hop dance as if they were separate things. I witnessed how breaking was moved to the side,” recollected Rokafella, who believed the same thing could have happened to popping if it had not been for Michael Jackson. “He carried popping wherever he went, so it lived through hip-hop mainstream. That movement was able to piggyback off his long, lengthy journey from the ‘70s to the early 2000’s.”
Even Rokafella moved on from breaking for a time. “I did New Jack Swing, uptown styles, and all that, and then circled back to breaking. It rekindled a desire to lock and to pop or boogie, and to rock, which I picked up again. I was lucky enough to do that, but I think it is because, at the time I started training in breaking, I was already aware of that. Groups like Chuck D and PE (Public Enemy), KRS-One, and Rakim weren’t being offered record deals anymore, offered to stay creative,” she acknowledged. “They were being sidelined with more gangsta rap lyricists or rappers being promoted. I was 21 or 22 at the time and wondered, ‘What kind of game are they playing?’ Picking up breaking was my way of defiance and preserving something from way back. You can do the new styles, but need to know where it came. We started to have other artists join our shows. We wanted to tell the world that so much was happening in the community underground that doesn’t get camera exposure. You got to believe that it is just as worthy as stuff that is on billboards. You just must see them or hear them, and you will be convinced.”
“That became my M.O. and Kwikstep’s M.O. A lot of people picked up that same attitude in the mid-to-late ‘90s,” she further stated. “We weren’t letting Hollywood tell us how to do it, when to do it. Once America’s Best Dance Crew came out (in 2008), Hollywood had picked it up again and was able to spread at least the idea that breaking is amazing and still happening. From that point, we didn’t have to do any more preservation, but it was just keeping the locals busy, practicing, and learning. In retrospect, if it hadn’t been exploited and chucked away, maybe I wouldn’t have jumped in as hard as I did, saying ‘We can’t let this be erased.’”
She admits that getting people interested in breaking is still not a given. “For the past 10 years, we have been working with young Puerto Rican dancers and it is a frustrating because everyone is still on their case, saying that breaking still isn’t ‘the thing.’ I think part of that, as with any dance in general, is it is not something where you are making a six-figure salary,” she commented. “We have been lucky to be together with young dancers. There are some good years and some lean years. Breaking is so niche in dance. Now it is going to the Olympics (after debuting at the Summer Youth Olympics in Argentina in 2018, breaking was approved for the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics), but that doesn’t mean everyone will end up with a big salary.”
Mental Health and Trauma Care
“In the last five years, there has been a shift to talk about mental health. It has been a taboo subject for many and even tougher for people of color,” stated Rokafella, who knows what a balancing act it can be. “We don’t want to bring that idea into the workspace that I have unresolved trauma. The flip side of that is having to put that out there and have white bosses or coworkers say they had nothing to do with that.”
In dance space, she and Kwikstep are careful to acknowledge that not everyone wants to be treated the same. “Some students are very vocal about their trauma and others are just coming to dance. We cater to each young person differently,” she explained. “Some young people don’t want to have to take on dealing with their trauma in the dance space. They just want to dance and shine. Others want to address these issues head-on and make things right in their lifetime. We aim to balance the experience for all those who come into the dance studio. We are known to share history and culture with students. It is rare that people don’t have time for that, so we build from there.”
Another way they make their space safe is having discussions about all kinds of issues that young people face. “People cycle in and out. Some show up for consecutive sessions, but people can come and go. When their cup is full and they can’t come, they know the door is always open for them to return,” Rokafella made clear. “Our discussions invite them to think. We talk about anything from graffiti and art to parole violations. All the things we discuss are intertwined. Even if we think they are not seeing or listening, some of it is getting in. We hope that when they are ready, it will penetrate and they may run into someone else with similar ideas and experiences, leading to more discussions.”
Trauma is something Rokafella knows all too well. “I came into breaking as a warrior, having already been sexually assaulted three times. I didn’t like people making jokes about women’s bodies and I was there to show that women didn’t have to have a certain look or bra size. Maybe I was a preview of what was to come with the ‘Me Too” movement,” she expressed. “I knew the music and wanted to come out with something better than someone else. That was the currency I wanted. Breaking liberated me, but also exposed me to people who couldn’t take an independent, self-sufficient woman. A lot of women at that time were groupies or asked to be in. Many men wanted women to be there, but only if they could tell them what to do.”
Working Across Generations
“Older dancers welcome mental health being at the forefront, but they may not be ready to talk about it themselves. They have been programmed to think a certain way. They have their own history of violence and history in street dance,” she stated. “If someone is starting to talk about mental health, we tread carefully regardless of age. I don’t want to bring you into a space that I’m not properly equipped to address your issues. When we have deep panel discussions like sexual harassment and street dancing, we make sure to have a therapist present. The talk may have opened some wounds and we didn’t just want to send people on their way after that. We wanted them to have someone trained to continue talking to them instead of leaving them at the edge of a bridge.”
Rokafella and Kwikstep take pride in their multi-generational clientele. “Full Circle has always been a nice coming together of young people who are learning about the legacy of the previous generations and the elders who laid that foundation and may have been tiptoeing back in,” she remarked. “It was crazy to be in the middle of that when breakers were left behind, but it was good because it gave us an awareness.”
She is fully aware of the challenges facing young dancers these days and has been intentional about bringing people together in a less competitive environment. “There is such an oversaturation of little clips and footage with video filters and effects. It is tough for young people to feel like they are enough,” she recognized. “Everyone else is simply reacting and we have moved away from that. The pandemic started so much isolation. We are feeling that and focusing on nurturing people. We run monthly parties that don’t include competition, but just jamming. There has been so much illusion from 2000 to now, which wasn’t what our generation was built on.”
“There are a lot of people in the dance and arts scene trying to shine amidst the isolation and competition. The same way that many people have returned to drum circles or faith communities, we can go back to feeding people’s souls in a way that others feel,” Rokafella added. “The authentic will never die out. It’s the way to say, ‘I love this and I’m inviting you to be a part of it. I hope you attend and get the best in this gathering.’”
“Society is very trend-based looking for what’s next. We are exposed to that, so we make a conscious decision to look back. We make a conscious decision to remind people of our ancestors. That may be counterculture, but it is important to do. Cherish the present, but also honor those experiences that built what we have today,” she summarized. “It is a very revolutionary act to revere the past.”