From June 3-5 the city of Eindhoven once again hosted E-moves Festival. The place for urban culture as it welcomes tricking, BMX, Skaters, Graffiti, a lot of Hip Hop music, dance battles and ofcourse break: elite bboys, nothing short of world class competing in World BBoy Classic! With qualifiers all over the globe from China to Surinam, this competition only begins by winning your national rounds. WBC invited 4 duos to add to the pressure. As it was not only mental but definitely physical since the venue of the main event was burning hot. Seemingly unharmful but unfortunately the moist in the air of the Effenaar made the floor a little slippery and some bboys we’re fighting the floor a little harder than their opponents. You can’t control certain circumstances. You can control your mind and your tactics. 
Saturday brought a long day of sunshine and strangely enough a cloudburst of hail and rain. There was enough time to snap some shots of the other street artists who were practicing and competing in front of the iconic building of PHILIPS. I was inspired and motivated after hearing Little Shao the night before speak about photography in the additional program item called beyond the battle floor. Very useful exchange and sharing of knowledge with the great Maurice van der Meijs, Maiko the Ripper (nothing short of, in fact), Venum and Syvixs. This brought me new insight and energy to capture the action. There was enough of that in many forms:
The final of World BBoy Classic brought some iconic meetings of the globe’s greatest and the hungriest to test them at it. This event is guaranteed every year to bring some interesting non-verbal conversations between all of them. The most enjoyable one was the opening round of Sunny… little did he know that Admiracles wasn’t here for it. Dominant while cheeky, he owned that round.
One of the semi-finals came down to Pelezinho & Neguin versus Ronnie & Hong 10. All of whom, are part of the Red Bull BC One All Star team. Not that this fact held them back from going in on each other. Stamina wise, Hong 10 and Neguin seemed more evenly matched than their partners. However the respect we should have for the entire team is undeniable if you considered their schedules these last few months. The audience tends to only appreciate this moment in time because their presence alone and the build up of the battle takes the reality out of the equation, instantly. As always, the biggest strength of anything -can be an equal downfall. The reality needs to regain some magic in another respect: Here at Step x Step, we vote back the judge demo’s to start off -any- event. It feels like the natural order.
The final featured a battle between Lussy Sky & Drud (winners) and Ronnie & Hong10. The former, are in a crew called NAVI. If your mind works a little like mine it will instantly think of Cameron’s movie Avatar. Lussy confirmed it is indeed a wink to the Navi tribe as their crew points to the ONE clan but it’s mainly focused on the abbreviation NA-tus VI-vincere from Latin language which supposedly means: “Born to Win”. Evidently they were.
Step x Step would like to thank the entire 45-Live team but in particular Paul van Dal and of course Angelo Martinus (MAD Skills) and consider the OFFICIAL WBC PARTNERS: EMOVES FESTIVAL, PUMA, PRODANCETV, MOUNFUNK, CAPBEAST.COM
More info on: www.worldbboyclassic.com
Invited duo’s for WBC: