By Darren Wendroff 

Andres "BMX" Velasquez weaves through the room bobbing his head and snapping his fingers. Besides Velasquez, room two of the Student Recreation and Fitness Center is silent as the Hip Hop Collective prepares for its Tuesday night practice.

Suddenly, he pops a CD into a boom box, and a tumultuous beat fills the room, sending every body into motion. A circle of people, or a cypher, forms around the Colombian native as he twists his body in 180-degree revolutions, creating a human gyroscope. On his last spin, he bounces his body in the air, does a half rotation and lands on his hands. Velasquez holds himself for a second, a second longer, and then collapses on his side.

"It's energy man, it's all about the energy, energy," he says with a beatific grin. "Everybody just feeds off the energy. If nobody is feeding energy, then the cypher will die, and everybody around will just leave."

Velasquez points out a cypher that has formed across the room. "See that group. That's where the energy is right now," he says. "When somebody starts breaking, people will go to that person, and then it hypes up. Creating and energy. That's hip hop."

Signs of hip-hop can be seen in fashion, dance, cinema, art, TV commercials, video games, education and language. Thirty-three colleges and universities from UCLA to MIT offer courses in hip-hop.

Be wary of calling hip-hop a category of this or that — it's a culture.

As the seminal artist KRS One once said, "Rap is something you do; hip-hop is a way of life."

Although hip hop was born on the streets of New York, it has been embraced worldwide. In France, it is known as la prise de parole (a turn to speak); in Hungary, the band Black Train employs hip-hop music to champion civil rights for Gypsies; and some of the world's best break-dancers have never left Beijing, China.

Misti Lewis, president of the Hip Hop Collective, spins on her head to keep the energy alive for the cypher. (Photo by Claudia Katz)

UF graduate student Dawn Elissa-Fischer Banks is the Education and Knowledge coordinator for the Hiphop Archive at Harvard University. Her dissertation topic covers hip hop as an educational resource in the United States and Japan. When she discusses hip hop, she drops knowledge with the enthusiasm of a person whose mind has produced 500 thoughts but who has only enough breath for 10 of them.

"Hip hop culture has been form ing for the past 1,000 years," Banks says frankly. "Due to colonization and forced migrations, people were moved throughout the world. These exploited groups shared similar situations of disenfranchisement and oppressive conditions, and thus developed similar methods of expressing this."

At UF, a club celebrating that culture is the Hip Hop Collective. With members from Korea, Denmark, Russia, Colombia, the United States, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, South Africa Tahiti and more, the Hip Hop Collective is beyond a club; it's more like a chapter of the United Nations.

"Basically from the beginning, our little garage crew was from all over," collective co-founder Kevin "Ninja" Tate says. "I'm from the States, my friend Chris (Ryu) is Korean, Ben (Huang) is Taiwanese, Raul (Quintana) is Nicaraguan. When we started out, people saw us and figured we weren't really worried about you being this or that. It was more important how you presented yourself in a group.

"In the beginning we were kicked out of every place we went to," Tate says. "We'd break at the Reitz and then get kicked out. Then we'd go to Jennings Hall and get kicked out. I mean people liked us, but we never got official permission, so they'd have to kick us out."

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