Ray Maestas, 26, and Eppie Deleon, 28, have been breakdancing — or b-boying, for the purists — for as long as they can remember.
They’ve known each other for close to 15 years, dancing side by side as part of the lauded break- dance crew GWT (Get Wit This). For years they’ve honed their style and technique with the help of mentors and teachers, as well as taken on all challengers when it came to dance battles.
As they got older, they began to pass on their knowledge, teaching classes at Motion Underground Dance Studio in Boulder. (The studio moved to Denver in December.)
Then, two years ago, Maestas and Deleon had an epiphany: They wanted to start their own crew.
They’d been teaching the same group of kids since they were really young; now the dancers are in their teens. “So we decided to break away and do our own thing with these kids, create our own crew and company and do something outside of the studio, on our own,” Deleon says.
Adds Maestas: “We wanted to take it to a professional level. We wanted to show these kids that you can do something positive and make a career out of this.”
The group practiced, trained and prepared to make moves bigger than any Colorado dance crew before it. The BreakEFX dance crew and company made its debut in January, and nine months later they are considered Colorado’s top dance crew.
In June, BreakEFX participated in the Colorado’s Best Dance Crew competition at Stapleton’s Northfield Mall. After four weeks of competing against well-known dance crews and studios like Motion 303 and Streetside Studios, BreakEFX came out on top.
“That was a really fun experience,” Hannah Vincent, a 19-year-old crew member from Boulder, says of the competition. “I think it brought the team together a lot, and we realized that we can actually do something with ourselves rather than be a little crew that travels around.”
Since the competition, the BreakEFX name has popped up on fliers promoting events from the Mighty 4 Colorado hip-hop jam held in downtown Denver earlier this summer to the Off the Community Festival in the Swansea neighborhood in July.
The crew has been in demand locally, but its vision is bigger.
“We’re getting our professional packet together and getting ready to hit up the corporate world,” says Maestas, who won the Fox Network reality competition show, 30 Seconds to Fame, in 2002.
“We’re contacting entertainment agents and trying to go that route instead of waiting for shows to come to us,” he says, “because if you can make an opportunity, you can get more out of life.”
Quibian Salazar-Moreno is a Denver freelance writer. This story first appeared in the Sept. 18 edition of The Denver Post’s Spanish-language newspaper Viva Colorado, on newsstands now.
