Freshmen! Don't Be Afraid of Hip Hop

Abstract

Freshmen! Don’t be Afraid of Hip Hop If you want to increase your artistic creativity and stay current in contemporary dance, you’ll want to expand your artistic horizons by Megumi Iwama At UC Irvine, during Week Zero of freshman year, you walk through the Anteater Involvement Fair shoveling your way past what feels like millions of flyers thrown in your face. You look up at the tall stage set up for the occasion, and you see the intimidating, powerhouse hip-hop dancers lined up waiting to perform. You wish you could be as cool and impressive as they are, but you say to yourself, “Nah, I am a concert contemporary dancer and hip-hop isn’t really artistic. I could never pursue that as an artistic career so I’m not gonna try…” Well I am here to tell you that hip-hop and contemporary are not that much different from each other. GASP, yes, I mean to tell you that contemporary dance and hip-hop are very stylistically similar in approach. Definition-wise, according to the National Arts Centre, contemporary “specifically means dance that developed from the roots of modern dance, but that it is no longer aligned with the modernist art movement of the 1930s” (artsalive.ca). On the other side of the spectrum, Christopher Gorney, the author of Hip Hop Dance: Performance, Style, and Competition, says, “hip hop dance is hip which the Merriam Webster Dictionary defines as ‘keenly aware of or interested in the newest developments or styles,’ so in a way it is always changing with time. Because it is hip, there are always new styles developing, but there are four that are generally accepted as the traditional styles of hip hop dance—locking, popping, b- boying/b-girling, and up-rocking” (Gorney). Both definitions state that these two kind of dance are evolving and always focused on developing new and modern ways of movement, so why is there such a disconnect between the hip-hop community and the concert contemporary dance community? Perhaps it has to do with concert dancers believing that hip-hop is inferior in artistic value. Contemporary stems from modern dance, which evolved from ballet, which was initially only performed for royalty and higher class audiences; whereas hip-hop grew from the streets, expressing frustrations of the African American community facing poverty and injustice. Dennis Dang, a fourth year bio major at UCI is involved in Common Ground, one of the most advanced competitive hip-hop teams on campus. Although he is not a dance major, he recently participated in two pieces in the undergraduate dance concert, Physical Graffiti, and was fully a part of the creative and rehearsal process. Since he can now compare, I asked him whether he believed hip hop has its own artistic elements and why. His first reaction was, “Of course! Hip hop is VERY artistic.” He further explained that, “Hip hop at its core is art because it combines intention with form. People use dance, especially hip hop, as a form of expression, and even so much as a survival tool in some communities.” So, yes, although Common Ground is a competitive dance team and art is something that goes beyond technique and winning, hip hop teams can also be artistic. The teams, Dang explains, “don’t really care about winning really—the competitions are just a stage space that allows the hip-hop community to come together and share their different ways of expression, movement, and stories, and the winning placements just come with.” He elaborates, saying, “We see more ‘technical’ movements integrated into hip hop sets now, and I want to say hip hop today is only different from contemporary and other similar styles in its spatial and temporal