Tour visits Denver, has crowds breaking and popping to the DJ.»

Break dancing takes stage at DCPA

A large crowd watched from the edges as four young guys traded off the dance floor, breaking and popping to the DJ. A little girl slowly walked into the center, seemingly nervous. After a little crowd encouragement, she danced — popping, locking and break dancing with the rest of them.

Denver is hosting the last leg of London-based Breakin’ Convention’s U.S. tour this weekend at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. It’s a weekend of dance, music, graffiti and workshops celebrating hip-hop culture.

“To see the positive side of hip-hop culture get the spotlight, challenging the negative stereotype that gets pushed in the media and pop culture” is one of the most exciting parts of the convention for Ian Flaws, the Denver rep who curated local dancers and artists for the weekend.

Flaws is the founder and owner of B-boy Factory, a niche dance studio focused solely on break dancing that’s located on Broadway just south of Interstate 76. Tuesday and Thursday, he opens the space to local crews to practice for free, getting 20 to 30 dancers inside.

He said the break dancing scene here has been growing in the past three years, saying Ophelia’s Electric Soapbox, La Rumba and Meadowlark were popular spots to dance in Denver. The city is starting to gain recognition nationally, he said.

In 2012 and 2015, Denver hosted regional qualifiers for the international Red Bull BC One competition. Red Bull Flying Bach, a group out of Berlin that dances to classical music, sold out its Denver shows in 2016, he said.

In the six years since he started B-boy Factory, last year’s was the biggest anniversary party.

“We are becoming one of the destinations along with the big cities,” he said, naming Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, New York, Miami and Orlando, Fla.

Friday, the first day of the convention, sold out, he said. He expected 2,500 to 3,000 more people to stop by Saturday and Sunday.

As Flaws was talking, Saturday’s wind wafted the smell of spray paint down from the parking garage immediately behind him.

Artists from BABES Crew, a local three-person graffiti artist crew that’s a couple years old, were creating pieces that will be hung as part of the set for “This is Modern Art,” a show about Chicago graffiti artists coming to the Denver Center in March and April.

“B boys embody the culture of graffiti, still,” said Charly Lewis, whose artist name is Taste.

He said break dancing and graffiti cultures are tightly wrapped around each other, both representing movement and loud color.

He and fellow artist Charlie Ricks, whose artist name is just Ricks, joked about the strength, especially core strength, that is required to break dance.

The dancing style has grown since break dancing first started gaining traction in the 1970s.

While it used to be the goal to do a windmill — a popular move where a dancer rolls his or her torso in a circular path on the floor — now people are doing double backflips.

Inside the Denver Center, kids and adults looked over a balcony to watch people break dance to a DJ on the floor below. Seven-year-old Leo Evjy-tekippe ran between a nearby coloring booth and the balcony, poking his head through the railing to watch. He had tried lessons before but it didn’t stick, said Anna Tekippe, his mother.

“My son is really into dancing and I wanted to come and have him see other boys dancing,” she said.