They’re B-boys (and girls), and the tools of their art are a floor and a boom box.

B-boys (also known as breakboys or break dancers) started in the 1970s in the Bronx (supposedly when a DJ named Kool Herc isolated the heavy, danceable “break beats” on funk tracks).

B-boying “grew to the point where other people took control of it,” says Jon Reid, of the hip-hop talent agency and event co-ordinator.

Back to the Underground. According to B-boy oral history, commercial music and dance overtook the street style to become what’s now known as hip-hop culture.

But B-boying has come back from the underground in recent years, reclaiming its place as the originator of hip-hop dance forms.

That will be evident in Toronto’s Yonge-Dundas Square July 12 and 13 when Montreal’s and Toronto’s finest B-boys go head to head and head to floor at the Style in Progress hip-hop festival.

The fest is a full-service hip-hop celebration, a good chance to see graffiti artists at work, to watch MCs, DJs and beat-boxers ply their styles, and to find out how well famed Toronto crews such as Supernaturalz (check them out in action), FAM and Bag of Trix, and individual B-boys such as Dyzee, Zen and Puzzlez, measure up to their Montreal opponents.

Supernaturalz has been around for 14 years. On their website, they list six generations of dancers. Fresh from winning top prize at Bboy Unit Canada 2008 at the Guvernment in March, Supernaturalz is bound to field some of its dynamite breakers for the battle between the two biggest centres of B-boying in Canada.

An all-day ground-level floor will be available to all B-boys and Bgirls ready to windmill to the crowd.

If you get really good, you might be asked by a crew such as Supernaturalz to come and rehearse with them. The crews work on their routines 25 to 30 hours a week. The favoured music is funk and soul, especially James Brown. It is said that Brown’s footwork in performance inspired the first break-dance or B-boy moves.

In the last six to eight years, B-boy culture has reconstituted itself as the foundation of hip hop. A recent American film, Planet B-boy, and All Out War, a forthcoming Bboy documentary with lots of Canadian content, chart the history.