All the Ladies Say. Directed by Ana "Rokafella" Garcia. New York: Third World Newsreel, 2010. 45 minutes.
Grown B-Girls Committed to Building Breaking Culture
All the Ladies Say places b-girls (women who break), poppers, lockers, and rappers center stage. Codirected by legendary b-girl Ana “Rokafella” Garcia and Gabriel “Kwikstep” Dionisio, the documentary smartly interrogates the place of girls and women in Hip Hop dance culture of the United States. This is Hip Hop filmmaking at its finest: deeply engaged in the culture’s investments in organizing around civic responsibilities and empowerment, it effectively counters a long history of misogyny and marginalization of female dancers.1
At the culture’s birth, breaking—the original dance of Hip Hop culture that was mislabelled “breakdancing” in the media (see Fogarty 2012)—and rap were foundational elements of Hip Hop, a point nicely underscored in the film’s opening scene, when various b-girls take center stage in 2006 to perform alongside West Coast rapper, Medusa (Raimist 1999). This short film features extensive dance footage (mostly circa 2005-2006) alongside interviews with key figures from the United States, including significant b-girls such as Aiko, Beta, Baby Love, Vendetta, Lady Champ, and Peppa. These various interviews with dance practitioners and conducted outside event venues, in kitchens, or at panel discussions at Hip Hop events, are combined with historical footage revealing the music, fashion, and attitudes of a rapidly transforming dance style. As breaking debuts as a new sport at the Paris Olympics in 2024, it’s important to bear witness to the complexity of the history of the dance (see Fogarty and Johnson 2022; Ng and Fogarty 2023). Recent scholarship has highlighted how the first generation of Hip Hop dancers included significant b-girls, who contributed to the aesthetics, style, and form of breaking (see Garcia 2023; Aprahamian 2023). In adherence with the goal of the Paris Olympics to increase gender equity in the games (from leadership to participation in the sports themselves) there was an equal amount of b-girls and b-boys competing in 2024.
Against masculinist views of Hip Hop culture in general, and breaking in particular, the documentary effectively does what Lauryn Hill’s lyric suggests in the song “Everything Is Everything”: “developing a negative into a positive picture.” The documentary also poses questions about motherhood, aesthetic performances of femininity (or not), and sexual relationships with other dancers. As Rokafella suggests in the film’s conclusion, while there may not be definitive answers to her questions, there is real value to be found in ongoing conversations built through community dialogue on these topics. For example, particular attention is paid to the sexual politics of the Hip Hop dance scene of the mid 2000s. When the film’s directors ask what a b-girl is, both men and women in the documentary answer that there is no difference between the genders, that it’s not about “male or female.” As Soulstice argues there’s “no gender” when it comes to breaking culture; instead, KwikStep suggests what really matters is how you “rock” or if you’re “nasty.” On the one hand, in this model, skills speak for themselves, and, on the other, b-girls in the documentary also address how b-boys get threatened when they start to regard b-girls as competition for jobs or battles.
Through its work to situate the experiences of b-girls within Hip Hop culture and US society more generally, All the Ladies Say represents Hip Hop dance as a way to express yourself in the world and to be seen as a dedicated artist in relation to children, parents, and male counterparts. Here is a film that represents Hip Hop dance as always already about being in the world in relation to others.
Works Cited and Suggested
Aprahamian, Serouj. 2023. The Birth of Breaking: Hip-Hop History from the Floor Up. New York: Bloomsbury.
Fogarty, Mary. 2012. "Breaking Expectations: Imagined Affinities in Mediated Youth Cultures." Continuum 26, no. 3 (May): 449-62.
Fogarty, Mary. 2024. "Each One, Teach One." In That’s the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, edited by Murray Forman, Mark Anthony Neal, and Regina N. Bradley, 395-406. New York: Routledge.
Fogarty, Mary, and Imani Kai Johnson. 2022. The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Dance Studies. New York: Oxford University Press.
Garcia, Ana. 2023. "Uplift the Breaking Trajectory." Global Hip Hop Studies 4, no. 1 (April): 63-66.
Johnson, Ariyan. 2023. "The Overlooked Contributions of African American Women Hip Hop Dancers to Breaking and Hip Hop Culture." Global Hip Hop Studies 4, no. 1 (April): 57-62.
Johnson, Imani Kai. 2022. Dark Matter in Breaking Cyphers: The Life of Africanist Aesthetics in Global Hip Hop. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ng, Jason, and Mary Fogarty. 2023. "In Pursuit of Gold: Breaking’s Debut at the Paris Olympics." Global Hip Hop Studies 4, no. 1 (April): 3-7.
Ng, Jason, and Mary Fogarty. 2023. "The Polarizing Politics of Breaking’s Inclusion in the Olympics.” Global Hip Hop Studies 4, no. 2 (December): 85-89.
Park, MiRi. 2022. "Learn Your History: Using Academic Oral Histories of NYC B-Girls in the 1990s to Broaden Hip Hop Scholarship." In The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Dance Studies, edited by Mary Fogarty and Imani Kai Johnson, 131-48. New York: Oxford University Press.
Raimist, Rachel, dir. 1999. Nobody Knows My Name. New York: Women Make Movies. 58 minutes.
1 A great supplementary resource when teaching this film is MiRi Park’s “Learn Your History,” in The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Dance Studies (2022). Park's chapter addresses how b-girls such as Honey Rockwell and Rokafella navigate being students of the dance in the 1990s while critiquing some of the so-called lessons they were being taught. Other supplementary resources for teaching in classrooms are listed in the “Works Cited and Suggested” section at the end of the review.