Hip hop dance

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The term "hip hop dance" covers a wide range of styles, including dances that have often been associated with hip hop culture, to those that are merely performed to the music. These styles have grown in popularity over the years, partly due to the rise in popularity of hip hop music. The term most often refers to breakdancing.

Contents 1 Old school 2 New school/new style 3 Competitions 4 Criticism 5 See also 6 External links

Old school

Old school hip hop dances are those styles that evolved in the seventies and were primarily danced to funk and old school hip hop music. Breakdancing is the best known of all hip hop dance styles, and is considered a corner stone of hip hop culture itself. In the 1980s, many funk dance styles that originally evolved separately from hip hop, such as popping and locking, started to be incorporated with the hip hop culture as well, and could be seen combined with breakdancing.

New school/new style

In the 1990s, as hip hop music evolved and grew further away from funk, it got slower, heavier and more aggressive. This modern hip hop music has given birth to new styles of hip hop dancing partly inspired by the old school styles, many of them focusing on upright dancing as opposed to breakdancing which is better known for its floor-oriented movements.

Some more specific styles of new school hip hop are krump,harlem shake, chicken noodle soup, c-walk, jigging, tone wop, freaking and hyphy.

Classifying these newer hip hop styles as a unique dance style of its own has grown common with larger street dance competitions such as Juste Debout, which includes new style as a separate category for people to compete in.

Many of the newer styles of hip hop are a common sight in today's music videos on television channels such as MTV.

Competitions

I DO, The International Dance Organization holds many competitions every year. The most important of them are the European Street dance Championships (which were held in Espoo, Finland this year and which will be held in Graz, Austria in 2007) and the World Championships which are held in Bremen, Germany each year.

Hoopdreamz Enterprises also holds many dance competitions throughout the southern hemisphere. Groove, the Australian state level Urban Dance Championships, is held in most state-capital cities since 2001. As recently as 2004, the competition was expanded to a national level including dance crews from New Zealand. The national level competition is known as Battlegrounds.

Criticism

Today, many dance studios offer hip hop classes of some sort. They might focus on a specific style such as breakdancing or combine elements of various street dance styles. As hip hop dancing is such a broad genre, the teacher has much freedom and room for personal interpretation, and often mixes various styles freely, even mixing them with other dance forms such as jazz.

Some criticize this type of teaching as being too strict and too choreographed, losing important elements such as improvisation and personal interpretation on the students' side. Because of this, some dislike labeling these dance classes as "hip hop" as it might not actually include all aspects of the traditional hip hop dances, especially when the teacher mixes it with dance styles not originally related to hip hop.

However, despite the controversy, studio-choreographed hip hop is still widely accepted today, especially by the younger youth group.

See also

• Breakdancing
• Hip hop culture
• Street dance

External links

• BBoyZone.com Breakdance Community - Breakdance/streetdance site featuring move guides and videos.
• Style2ouf - Has streetdancing guides, videos messageboards.
• Hoopdreamz - Hip Hop Entertainment Group - Australian Entertainment Group that organises dance competitions.
• MikesMoves-Learn Hip Hop Dance Moves - Hip Hop Dance site featuring guides, videos, pictures.
• NY Hip-Hop Dance Convention- An annual 5 day street dancing event in November.
• BLADE Dance Academy - Organization that develops hip hop dancers for professional work in the entertainment industry.