On a humid July evening in 1983, a teenage Marcus "B-Boy Marvel" Townsend spun on his back across a strip of cracked pavement outside the old Rexall drugstore on West Florissant Avenue. A crowd of two dozen had formed a circle around him. Someone held a boombox blinking Grandmaster Flash. When Marvel finally froze in a handstand, the crowd erupted.
Forty years later, that same intersection sits in the shadow of a Planet Fitness. But Townsend, now 58, teaches footwork and power moves three miles east at Parkway City Dance Collective, a 4,000-square-foot studio with sprung maple floors, mirrored walls, and a framed poster from the 2024 Paris Olympics—where breakdancing made its debut, though its future on that stage remains uncertain.
The journey from that drugstore parking lot to this climate-controlled classroom is more than one dancer's career arc. It traces how an art form born in the Bronx arrived in a mid-sized Missouri city, adapted to local soil, and gradually won institutional respect—while never fully shedding its street-born edge.
"We Had to Make It Ours"
Breakdancing did not explode spontaneously in Parkway City. Townsend first encountered it in 1981, on a family trip to Chicago, where he watched a crew battle on the Magnificent Mile. He returned home, taught himself the moonwalk from a Soul Train rerun, and recruited two cousins and a neighbor into a crew called Ground Level.
"There was no infrastructure," Townsend said, leaning against a ballet barre during a break between his youth and adult classes. "No studios, no YouTube, no workshops. We had to make it ours."
Theirs was a scavengered practice. The crew trained on linoleum kitchen tiles they'd drag to parking lots, which offered smoother surfaces than Missouri asphalt. They battled at block parties, school gyms, and once—memorably—at the St. Louis Gateway Festival, where they were booed off a stage by a rock cover band's fans.
"What we did wasn't considered dance," Townsend said. "It was 'that stuff the kids do.'"
For years, that perception held. While ballet and jazz occupied the formal dance economy of Parkway City, breakdancing circulated through teenage rumor andmixtape trade. A second wave arrived in the early 1990s, when West Coast hip-hop began dominating MTV and local high schools formed informal lunchroom battle circuits. But no studio in the city offered classes. Dancers either taught themselves or apprenticed under older crew members.
The First Permanent Floor
The turning point came in 2004, when dancer and physical education teacher Dana Okonkwo leased a former martial arts dojo on Pine Street and opened Parkway City Dance Collective. Okonkwo, then 31, had trained in modern dance at Howard University and discovered breakdancing through her younger brother. She saw possible crossover: the isolations of popping, the floor work of contemporary, the athletic conditioning that competitive dancers increasingly needed.
"I got a lot of side-eye from the dance establishment here," Okonkwo recalled. "Ballet schools thought I was running a gym. Some b-boys thought I was sanitizing the culture. My argument was: give people a floor that won't shred their elbows, and see what they create."
The bet paid off, though slowly. Okonkwo started with twelve students in a six-week summer session. By 2010, she employed three instructors and offered year-round classes in breaking, popping, and locking. The studio's competitive team, PCC Breakers, began traveling to regional jams in Kansas City, Chicago, and Memphis.
More significantly, the Collective became a generational bridge. Veteran dancers like Townsend, who had spent decades in informal crews, began teaching structured classes. Teenagers who learned windmills in mirrored studios started showing up at outdoor battles, adapting studio-polished technique to asphalt and concrete.
Olympic Momentum, Local Tension
The 2024 Paris Olympics accelerated everything—and complicated it.
When the International Olympic Committee announced in 2020 that breaking would appear in Paris, enrollment at Parkway City Dance Collective jumped 34 percent over the next eighteen months, according to Okonkwo. Parents who had previously steered children toward ballet or gymnastics suddenly inquired about breaking scholarships. The city Parks and Recreation Department added a summer breaking camp in 2023, its first.
Kyra Dunne, 22, embodies that new pipeline. She started breaking at age nine in a Collective beginner class, won her first national competition at sixteen, and now trains under Portuguese coach Ricardo "Ricfresh" Silva, who relocated to St. Louis in 2022 and visits Parkway City twice monthly. In March, Dunne placed third at the Midwest Olympic Breaking Qualifier in Detroit.
"My coach talks about 'the foundation' constantly—toprock, footwork, freezes
