Break Dancing in Morocco

“It’s a great outlet for negative energy,” Mr. Ambelj said. “I love that there are no rules. I can express anything I want. It makes me feel free.”

“As a young guy in Casablanca, if you don’t have money or you don’t want to sit in a cafe every day talking about football, one fun thing is to go to a space and conquer it,” said Cristina Moreno Almeida, a postdoctoral fellow at King’s College in London who has studied hip-hop culture in Morocco. “It’s a global language that they all speak and they all know.”

“We were first attracted by the music, the appearance of the dancers,” he said. “They dressed as they wanted and they looked free. We loved that it was simply an artistic expression free of judgment.”

Yassine Alaoui Ismaili, who took these photographs, was part of the early 2000s wave of break dancers in Casablanca. His story is a familiar one: He saw people dancing in a park and was instantly drawn toward their energy.

“It is the same spirit here as when it was created in the Bronx,” Mr. Ismaili, 33, said. “People were craving a place to express themselves.”

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