Ignited by an electric collision of theatre, breaking, and lyrical flow, How to Break tells the story of two teenage dancers battling their hospital caregivers for control over their own bodies. Small gaps in race, class, and language between Ana (a popper with leukemia), Joel (a b-boy with sickle cell), and their treatment team – a pediatric hematologist, a music therapist and a nurse with a beatboxing problem – create life-threatening rifts.

​

The nurse mixes patients’ breath and IV beeps into beatboxed hospital soundscapes; the doctor and therapist wrestle over the health benefits of art versus painkillers; Ana and Joel break through their diagnoses to ask what it means to be ill.

​

Hip-hop playwright Aaron Jafferis – longtime writer-in-residence at a children’s hospital – brought stories of teenagers living with cancer and sickle cell disease to beatboxer Yako 440, folk rocker Rebecca Hart, composer Jacinth Greywoode, and the Mixing Texts Collective (breaking pioneers Kwikstep and Rokafella, beatboxer Adam Matta, and director Christopher Edwards), who together created an original musical exploding our notions of sickness and health.