Breakers are among the most injured dancers. Can motion capture technology change that?

Breaking has been around for more than 50 years, but the dancing sport with its roots in hip-hop culture has been getting more recognition recently since its viral moment in the summer Olympics. And now, that includes a new university-backed effort to reduce injuries.

This fall, USC health and dance students will come together to explore how to make breaking safer using sports medicine technology.

How the program will work

Breakers are highly injured dancers, but not a lot is known about why. The program aims to resolve this by bringing breaking and medical research together.

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Breakers, aka B-boys and B-girls, in the USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance will have their spins, twists and slides collected using motion capture technology. That will then be turned into data, which the students will analyze to see if patterns emerge.

The program is a multidisciplinary partnership with USC’s division of biokinesiology and physical therapy, the Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young academy and the Glorya Kaufman School of Dance.

B-girl Ami of Team Japan competes with B-girl India of Team Netherlands during the Breaking B-Girls Quarterfinal 1 battle

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Susan Sigward, director of the master’s in biokinesiology program, said motion capture is typically used for traditional court or field athletes — like to analyze a volleyball serve or baseball pitch — so this is new territory.

It also usually focuses solely on injury. And while that’s a main goal of the program, Sigward said the non-traditional approach also lets them explore how to help breakers become better dancers.

“[W]e can even start to get a much better idea about human movement in this skill that requires multi-joint coordination,” Sigward said. “And even push the dancers in a performance side versus just worrying about their longevity.”

Injury rates can be hard to determine because it’s a small population, said Marisa Hentis, an assistant professor of clinical physical therapy who specializes in performing arts. It’s also possible that the injuries are higher than reported, since most breaking is unsupervised. These dancers spend years perfecting things like head spin rotations and build muscle strength to perform safely.

“I will tell you from my clinical expertise that breaking injuries tend to be more acute injuries or more sudden injuries,” Hentis said. “By the time B-boys and B-girls actually come to the clinic, it’s more for ‘I fell on my hand wrong’ or ‘I fell on this wrong’ or ‘I twisted my ankle’ — versus in the general dance population we tend to see more overuse injuries.”

Developing the motion capture process

Biokinesiology master’s student Katie Kim has been helping coordinate early development of the program. She said the team had to first figure if it was even possible to capture the data, so they tested different tools.

Most motion capture research in sports sciences uses reflective markers to pick up movements, but subjects typically wear tight-fitting suits. Dante Rose, a dance lecturer at USC with more than 20 years of experience in breaking, is one of the dancers who helped test it out.

“Katie put the suit on me, put all the dots… put a little cap on me and then was like, ‘All right, go for it. Show us what you can do,’” Rose said. “And it was incredibly uncomfortable and very restricting, but a lot of fun.”

Rose testing out the motion capture tech.

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Breaking is all about energy and flexibility, so that wasn’t ideal. Rose couldn’t wear the typical loose clothing he liked and that affected how he’d dance. The team has since moved to a markerless system where the person just has to step in front of a series of cameras — no suit required.

“That turned out to be super successful. So now we can move forward to what are we going to do with the data?” Kim said.

And that’s the big ask.

Students will come from Rose’s class multiple times, so the team can analyze progress over time.