By now you've already seen four photos from photographer Yoriya's project "From the streets to the Olympics." I wanted to not only feature his work for its beautiful visuals, but also give it proper analysis as a wonderful firsthand account of the Moroccan breaking scene, as seen by a Moroccan breaker.

From the streets to the Olympics: Photographs by Yoriyas
In his photographic project “From the streets to the Olympics,” Yassine Alaoui Ismaili  (known as the moniker Yoriyas) captures intimate moments of breakdance culture in Morocco, Senegal, Algeria, France, the Netherlands and Germany through the lense of an experienced Morocan breaker. Yoriyas is a Casablanca-based photographer and performance artist who became a breaker at 16 and eventually traveled the world as a professional competitive dancer. When he was unfortunately hit with a serious knee injury in 2013 and unable to continue competing, Yoriyas began using photography as a way to express himself and capture the joy he finds in his community.  His work aims to illustrate that breaking “gathers a global connected community” (Alaoui, slide two) in which individuals compete and battle each other, but also deeply support each other's goals and aspirations. Yoriyas explains that “outside of competition and cypher is a space which mostly stays invisible-- the moments of individual privacy, collective happiness or celebration of the joy in movement, shared with friends in any space that seems suitable to be transformed into a dance arena” (Alaoi, slide two) and that his primary goal with this project is to visibilize these moments. He captures breaking in a wide variety of environments and performed by a wide variety of bodies; from breakers performing flips outside of/on top of a house with an older man standing inquisitively in the doorway, to a man peering around the corner from a bright hallway with mothers and their toddlers to watch a young kid in the center of the cypher of the adjacent room, to a hijabi dancing with joy in the middle of a party. Yoriyas does not label any of these photos with the countries or locations they were shot in, nor provide individual titles or any writing about the context of the specific moment. This lack of site-specific naming furthers Yoriyas desire to portray breaking as an interconnected transnational culture which can bring any individual joy in movement in any environment. He captures the limitless spheres breaking can exist in and the international community as having the ability to gather anywhere from places we typically associate with antiquity to places we view as extremely modern. Furthermore, in only one image (a photo of a man with his prosthetic legs taken off balancing on his hands on the beach) of the sixteen image series is the subject looking at Yoriyas; whether focused on the dancer or viewer of dance, whether the subject is praying in front of their door or mid-acrobatics, all other fifteen capture people who are not performing for the camera. They are concentrating intently or exploding with joy, but they are simply being in their environment.

These photos add significantly to my project. For one, they capture the environment and expressions of Moroccan breakdancers (both within Morocco and internationally) through the lense of an actual Moroccan breaker. Secondly, they reflect both how individuals find embodied joy, power, and community through breaking, and how breaking fits perfectly within the schema of a globalized world in which culture knows no borders. There are specific images that I could plug into different parts of my argument, for example the photo of a (presumable) breaker praying in front of a door covered in rap stickers can be related to Salois’s claim that Moroccan musickers use hip hop culture to create alternative frames for what a pious Muslim Moroccan subject looks like. Yoriyas work allows us to visualize both what has been captured in the data of my textual sources, and to see what life is like as a Moroccan breaker outside of Morocco.

Alaoui Ismaili, Yassine. “From the Street to the Olympics.” Y O R I Y A S, https://yoriyas.com/gallery/streettoolympics/. Accessed November 27th 2019.