Abstract
A subdiscipline of skateboarding, freestyle involves short routines on open, flat terrain that are choreographed to music. In this study, I pay particular attention to the sonic and kinesthetic attributes of freestylers’ performances. By conducting interviews with practitioners, analyzing audiovisual recordings of contestants’ routines, and providing my own experiences as a competitor and spectator, I demonstrate that the sound of maneuvers, the accompanying music, and the act of choreographing maneuvers to musical selections carry a certain acoustemology—that is, knowing through sound—in freestyle contests. Although scholarship in sound studies has examined how trick sounds inform skateboarders’ embodied knowledge, research tends to focus on the sport’s most popular style: street skating (Maier, 2016). As a result, the sonic and corporeal practices deployed among freestylers have been largely overlooked.
In my first chapter, I explore how freestylers engage with and sonify space in unprescribed ways. When freestylers compete at skateparks, they reappropriate the terrain between obstacles—sites intended to be traversed en route to obstacles—as a performance space. By silencing the structures, sonically activating the terrain in new ways, and endowing the skatepark with their musical selections, contestants dominated the space’s soundscape. In my second chapter, I illuminate how Japanese prodigy Yuzuki Kawasaki’s deployment of “Cotton Eye Joe” is both informed by and indexes Japanese judging criteria (that is, choosing music that will engage the crowd) and has become an aural signifier of his presence and prestige at freestyle contests. Lastly, in my final chapter, I demonstrate how freestylers’ engagement with music resists the alternative masculinity established in dominant skateboarding culture—which privileges transgression and risk-taking as “masculine” and subordinates grace and delicacy as “effeminate”—insofar as they juxtapose aggressive or powerful musical styles and genres with graceful and delicate movements (Karsten and Pel, 2000; Beal, 1996).