B-Girl Bar-B on the floor: From a Mumbai suburb slum to World Final in New York | Sports News,The Indian Express
India Breaking champ Siddhi Tambe has benefitted from growing in small spaces and now aims to take on the world.
B-Girl Bar-B, born Siddhi Tambe, grew up in the constricted spaces of a Mumbai western suburb slum, before moving into a typically-crowded one-room rental quarters at Bandra East. Such compressed and squeezed spaces lend themselves beautifully to hip hop’s popping (movements that accentuate flexing and relaxing of muscles) and locking (movement freezes) basics.
Though it was the 18-year-old’s mother Sneha, whose unconditional support, born out of her own unfulfilled dance dreams, that pushed the teen into Breaking, and has now earned her a ticket to New York after emerging India champ at the Red Bull BC One Cypher earlier this month.
“Main hamesha hilti dulti rehti thi” (I would keep swaying from one foot to another and never stood still), Bar-B recalls, adding that what might appear weird to the world was seen as groovy and blessed with a sense of rhythm and beat, by her dance-mad mother.
Mumbai’s chawl and low-income housing localities have always boasted of a community dance culture – be it Ganeshotsav Mandals, street dandiya under makeshift shamianas, beach-side koli colonies, tiny mirrored dance studios for amateur Bollywood ‘steps’ jigs or community centres ballroom dances in Christian neighbourhoods. Where B-Girl Bar-B took her first steps in Breaking was a similar community centre with long windows and yellow-and-cream walls shared by her Cardinal Gracias High School in Subhash Nagar’s Ali Yawar Jang Marg.
“My mother took me to the ‘audition’, where you dance to a song, and the reward for being selected is you get to learn choreographed Bollywood dances under seniors. It’s there that Ashok Dada and other Dadas (older male dancers) taught me footwork, style and the basic moves of Breaking,’ she recalls.
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