Everyone can have a bad day at the office. But for most of us, it doesn’t take place in front of millions of viewers at the world’s biggest sporting event. Such was the lot of Rachael Gunn, AKA B-girl Raygun, who scored a memorable nul points for Australia at the Paris Olympics in 2024 with her routine topped off with a kangaroo hop.
Gunn was pilloried on social media, partly over the quality of her dance (more on that later), but mostly just the usual sexist guff directed at any woman in the public eye deemed to be in the wrong. A year later, the pile-on continues: this time in musical theatre form at Breaking the Musical, an Edinburgh fringe comedy that is either a funny bit of bants or a cruel character assassination, depending on your point of view.
The cardinal sin Gunn appears to have committed in Aussie comedian and writer Steph Broadbridge’s eyes is not being able to laugh at herself. A version of the show was cancelled in Sydney in December after receiving notice from Gunn’s lawyers. As Broadbridge told the New York Times, the jokes then got meaner, legal action became part of the show, the protagonist’s name became Spraygun and they called it fiction.
It’s a very silly and not unentertaining show (especially, I imagine, if you are Australian – there are a fair few niche jokes), but I did feel sorry for Gunn. Spraygun is painted as an entitled rich girl who is deluded thinking she could get to the Olympics, cheats her way into the squad and robs Australia of its dignity in front of the rest of the world.
One rumour at the time was that Gunn’s husband had been on the selection panel but that’s not true. The way the overall selection process was designed, there were spots for the hosts, world championship winners and top dancers from a series of qualifying competitions, plus one from each continent’s own championship, which is how Gunn got on the squad. The Oceania B-girl scene is clearly not as developed as other regions worldwide in large part because if its size (only 0.6% of the global population.) So, yes, she was lucky, and better breakers from all over the world missed out, but it wasn’t Gunn’s fault. It’s also worth saying there are fantastic dancers who don’t believe in breaking as a sport and may not have entered anyway. (No dancers from the UK qualified, male or female.)
Against the world’s best, Gunn was out of her depth, but was she really that bad? If you watch all her rounds, she’d definitely outdance 99% of the trolls ridiculing her. She had a few power moves (headspins, backspins) and freezes. Floorwork in breaking is difficult, and it’s not always graceful. Sure, her style’s a bit awkward – the new wave of teen B-girls are much more agile and athletic than the older generation – so she leant on humour, personality, idiosyncrasy, which are all legitimate parts of battle culture. Especially by the final round when she had no chance to get through, she just tried to have some fun. She didn’t quite pull it off, but that’s live improvisation for you.
Breaking the Musical has a big problem with the fact that the dancer is white and middle class. “Be an ally, stick to ballet” goes a line in one song. It’s a neat half-rhyme, but are we really gatekeeping who’s allowed to do what kind of dance? It’s imperative to acknowledge breaking’s Black American and Latino roots, and to consider access of opportunity and training and funding structures that may disadvantage certain groups, but hip-hop is a global art form now, with some of the best dancers coming from China and Japan. It used to be that you could only learn on the streets, in the community, or by crossing the country to train directly with others. Now young dancers teach themselves in their bedroom from YouTube. It’s an expanding culture but that’s a mark of the art form’s phenomenal success. There’s also a lot of mockery that Gunn has a PhD and that her thesis was on gender in hip-hop dance. So hip-hop culture isn’t worthy of academic study, you say?
Broadbridge would probably think I’m being over-earnest. What’s most sad about the whole fiasco is that breaking is already out of the Olympics, without the event having time to bed in and iron out any of the flaws. It hasn’t been chosen for the 2028 Los Angeles Games and we’ll have to wait and see for Brisbane 2032. The hoo-ha over Raygun’s performance (rather than the performance itself) overshadowed the top-level artists. Does anyone even remember who won?
• Breaking the Musical is at Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh, until 24 August
