On October 11 and 12, b-boys and girls will descend on Calgary for Ready or Not, the biggest b-boy competition in Western Canada at the Polish Canadian Cultural Centre. Divided into two days of dizzying acrobatics, the first day will be devoted to the 10th anniversary of Calgary’s oldest b-boy crew, the Original Rudes, and the second will see teams competing for cash and bragging rights.

Saturday will feature a large, uncontrolled dance “cypher” — essentially a circle of b-boys and girls who periodically call each other out and, to swipe a phrase from Public Enemy, get up, a-get-get, get-down. The second day will be a more controlled affair. “You’ll see more of the raw stuff on Saturday with Original Rudes’s anniversary, but on Sunday we’re going to compete for $5,000,” says Ryan Josue, head b-boy at Ill Movements, the group responsible for hosting the event. “I think more mainstream people will want to come out and see that. It’s more organized, and there are judges, but on Saturday there aren’t any judges.”

Judges, freestyle — it’s as though breakdancing is what happens when figure skating meets skateboarding. Now, before every b-boy crew in the city comes to my house to backflip-kick me in the head, hear me out. While that’s certainly historically inaccurate reductionism, it illustrates the spirit of the form better than any other comparison I can think of. In figure skating, one or two people glide around to music and pull off a series of dazzling aerial manoeuvres pulled from a rigidly controlled catalogue of moves. The quality of the movements is almost completely unreadable to anyone but other figure skaters or the judges.

In skateboarding, lunatics with no concern for their physical health careen over concrete gymnasiums, attempting to show each other up by pulling from freer moves and through improvisation. Skateboarding shares another peculiar similarity to b-boying: There’s no ranking system, no standardized professional skill level, no black belt. Josue thinks this is one of the most important, and most misrepresented elements of b-boy culture.

“We always get a lot of people asking us, who did we train with?” he says. “But it’s like, training? We trained with everybody. There are guys who have a lot of respect — some of the originators of the form — and we’ve got some guys who have trained with those guys, but there’s no dance government that says you’ve moved from level one to level two. One of the great things about breakdancing is that rawness. Lots of guys make up their own moves all the time, and there’s no one saying you can’t do that.”

Gymnastics, another athletic pursuit that shares many of breakdancing’s esthetic flourishes — but none of its performance art affectations — recently adopted a popular breakdancing move into its canon of manoeuvres. The air flare, as it’s called, has the gymnast or b-boy in question spread their legs out like two propeller blades and then whirl them about in concentric circles without letting their feet touch the ground. The gymnasts are concerned only with the mathematical precision of the move, whereas the b-boys are much looser and messier. Their greater focus on showmanship and keeping time with music makes them far more entertaining to watch.

“A lot of the stuff that you see is made up. They just made it up on the street,” says Josue. “It’s flamboyant and acrobatic because there were a lot of other influences, right? Like martial arts and capoiera. Some guys will go to gymnastic class to work on what we would call power. In breakdancing, there’s foundation, or toprock, and then there’s also power, or downrock, which has a lot of gymnastic moves in it,” says Josue.

Foundation and power will be on display at Ready or Not, and while the Saturday show may give a truer snapshot of b-boy culture, Sunday will be the more accessible. Even for those without any knowledge of hip hop music or culture, the raw, improvisational style of b-boying has enough cognates in other forms that almost everyone should find something to enjoy.