Shenzhen is capital of the inauthentic. There’s an Eiffel Tower. A replica Italian Town has been constructed for the emerging upper-classes to live.

And for every ‘brand name’ product on sale in Shenzhen’s shinny mauls, there are ten fakes available from any backstreet store.

Culture has become a simulacrum too. Art here is copied out on an industrial scale and is destined for middle-class bathroom walls rather than public spaces. Counterfeit DVD stores are dominated by Hollywood B-movies and big budget Chinese melodramas. And translated euro-pop, performed by Taiwanese bubble-gum songsters, blares out from most radio sets.

So it may be surprising to discover a group of kids doing something legitimate, individualistic and hip at the end of Dong Men Jie (东门街) a street renowned in the city for its abundant, low quality knock-off stores, shady touts and thieves.

In the doorway of Shen Zhen Xi Yuan (深圳戏院) beside an old karaoke joint and a Japanese Sushi franchise, boys ranging from nine years old to thirty, congregate to break dance each evening.

“People just stand and stare,” says Xiao Bai (小白) a nineteen year old dancer from Meizhou. “They are like,what is this?”

I ask him why he comes here to dance. “When you’re not happy you can come here and dance. Breaking solves your bad mood. If you have pressure and stress in work you can come here and dance it off.”

I tell Xiao Bai that I’m wondering where they got the music from as I am intrigued to find out how they came to break to James Brown and Funkadelic, among others of that era. I’m told A Chao (啊超) a tall, well built twenty-one year old from Zhejiang is the DJ, but am dismayed when he appears not to know or care much about it.

“A friend just gave me the music and said it’s good for dancing,” he tells me casually, clearly unaware of how much street-cred I’d awarded them for seeking out the music at the core of their art.

“Why do you break dance?” I ask.

“Dancing is individualism; you can feel different from others,” A Chao says coyly before skipping off to take centre stage amongst his friends to downrock.

Gong Yao (龚曜) is an expert in popping. He approaches me in robot-mode, gives me a point and wink then relaxes and engages me in quite reasonable English. He tells me he sells Nokia by day in Hua Qiang Bei (华强北) but comes here at night to pop.

“I dance for pleasure, that’s it.”

“How did you learn to dance?” I ask.

“A friend at University introduced street dance to me. But you know, the students dance the styles they see on TV, it’s not real. I check the internet for my moves. We all do.”

I sit and watch the guys spin and swipe for about an hour. There’s something so unaffected, genuine, perhaps even a little naive in this motley crews amity. I can’t help but find their company endearing, especially when considering the fact that they’re actually good at what they do. Occasionally they chat with me about Beijing rock or where I got my Feiyue trainers from, but for the most part they concentrate on the dance. And in a country where the ‘b’ in b-boy usually stands for ‘backstreet’ I am perhaps, a little reassured that the commercial sensibilities of the city and sanitised nonsense broadcast on TV cannot suppress a bunch of migrant kids from seeking each other out and doing something worthwhile. As dancer Wei Hao (魏好) put it “We’re all about the underground.” Kudos to the Dongmen Boys!

Text by Tom Bird, Photos by VADC

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