Hip-hop dance

• 1. Introduction

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  Hip-hop dance was born on the streets of New York and California in the 1970s, and it has never fully left them. In 1973, DJ Kool Herc threw parties in the Bronx and did something simple: he looped the break section of a record using two copies of the same vinyl. That interlude, extended into something dancers could really move to, became the engine of a new art form. The question the rest of this documentary will answer is how a set of street styles created without studios, without counts, and without choreographers became a global cultural force with its own competitions, conservatories, film festivals, and theatrical productions on London's West End.

• 2. The Founding Styles

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  Breaking was created in the South Bronx in the early 1970s and is considered the first hip-hop dance style. Afrika Bambaataa classified it as one of the five pillars of hip-hop culture, alongside rapping, DJing, graffiti writing, and knowledge. Its earliest form was not the floor-oriented acrobatics audiences recognize today. It started as toprock, dancing performed while standing upright. An influence on toprock was uprock, created in Brooklyn, which looked similar but was more aggressive and resembled a physical fight. By the late 1970s, many African American dancers had moved on from breaking. Richard "Crazy Legs" Colón, the president of Rock Steady Crew, described what happened next in a 2001 interview: "We always maintained the flava. It was like a changing of the guard and all we did was add more flava to something that already existed." Puerto Rican dancers kept breaking alive during that period, and their influence brought the acrobatic power moves that define modern breaking. At the same time, on the opposite coast, a different set of styles was developing. The funk styles emerged from California in the 1970s, including roboting, locking, popping, bopping, boogaloo, and several others. Boogaloo is one of the oldest, beginning as a 1960s fad dance before evolving into a street style in Oakland and even a separate music genre called Latin boogaloo. The television show Soul Train, which premiered in 1970, gave locking and popping their first major commercial exposure. Both The Lockers and The Electric Boogaloos performed on the show before either crew had fully formed.

• 3. Locking, Popping, and the Funk Styles

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  Don "Campbellock" Campbell created locking in 1969 in Los Angeles, originally calling it Campbellocking. His crew, The Lockers, included Fred "Mr. Penguin" Berry, Leo "Fluky Luke" Williamson, Adolfo "Shabba-Doo" Quiñones, Bill "Slim the Robot" Williams, Greg "Campbellock Jr" Pope, and Toni Basil. Basil managed the group and would later be the first female recipient of the Living Legend Award at the 2009 World Hip Hop Dance Championships. In locking, dancers hold their positions longer than in other styles. The primary move is the lock, described as similar to a freeze or a sudden pause. Locking is more playful and character-driven than its close neighbor, popping, and lockers have a distinct wardrobe: colorful clothing with stripes and suspenders. Popping was created in Fresno, California, and popularized by Samuel "Boogaloo Sam" Solomon and his crew the Electric Boogaloos. It is built on quickly contracting and relaxing muscles to produce a jerk in the body called a pop or a hit. Popping also works as an umbrella term for a wide range of related illusionary styles: strobing, liquid, animation, tutting, and gliding among them. In liquid, the body movements look like water. In strobing, also called ticking, the movements are staccato and jerky. Tutting uses the arms, hands, and wrists to form right angles and geometric box-like shapes, a movement style whose name references the art of ancient Egypt. Timothy "Popin' Pete" Solomon of the Electric Boogaloos objects to the umbrella usage, arguing that many of these related styles cannot be traced back to the same origin and that crediting them all to popping denies their creators recognition. Despite confusion in casual usage, Dance Spirit magazine notes that a dancer cannot perform locking and popping simultaneously, so calling the combination "pop-locking" is inaccurate.

• 4. The Commercial Turn

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  When the dance industry noticed hip-hop in the 1980s, it responded by creating its own version. This studio-based style, sometimes called "new style", is the kind of hip-hop dance seen in rap, R&B, and pop music videos. The term was actually coined by dancers outside the United States. According to Moncell Durden, adjunct professor at Drexel University, the 1992 dance documentary Wreckin' Shop From Brooklyn was influential to hip-hop dancers in France and Japan. Those dancers began calling the social dancing they saw "new style," short for "New York Style." Toni Basil introduced eight-counts into locking in the 1970s, a method of counting dance steps to stay in sync with music. Basil had been trained in ballet before Don Campbell introduced her to street dance, and she taught the rest of The Lockers how to dance to counts. That was a pivotal step toward bringing hip-hop from the street into the studio. Buddha Stretch began teaching formal hip-hop dance classes in 1989 at Broadway Dance Center in New York City. That same year, Janet Jackson performed the Running Man in her music video for "Rhythm Nation," choreographed by street dancer Anthony Thomas. A few years later, Michael Jackson used hip-hop in his 1992 music video "Remember the Time," choreographed by Fatima Robinson, then a 21-year-old street dancer with no formal training, working her first music video job. Choreographers and hip-hop educators have pushed back against how the studio world absorbed these styles. Emilio "Buddha Stretch" Austin, Jr. told Dance magazine: "There are a lot of jazz dancers out there doing pseudo hip hop. A lot of teachers don't know the history, they're just teaching the steps. They're learning from videos, but they don't know the culture." Safi Thomas put it to The Bronx Journal this way: without grounding in the foundational movements of popping, locking, boogaloo, breaking, and the social dances, a class set to hip-hop music is not a hip-hop class.

• 5. Derivative Styles and New Generations

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  Memphis Jookin' developed in the 1980s in Memphis, Tennessee from an older local line dance called The Gangsta' Walk. Its signature feature is gliding on tiptoes, a skill that struck dance critic Alastair Macaulay when he watched a jookin' battle in Jackson, Tennessee. Macaulay noted that the men not only rose onto point in sneakers but also hopped, turned, ran, and balanced on point. Jookers have traditionally practiced at the Crystal Palace skating rink in Memphis, a space that functions for jookin the way public milongas do for tango dancers in Buenos Aires. Turfing, an acronym for Taking Up Room on the Floor, was created in 2002 by Jeriel Bey in Oakland, California. It fuses miming and gliding, with heavy emphasis on storytelling and illusion. Local turf dance competitions and youth programs in the San Francisco Bay Area helped turfing avoid becoming a passing fad. Jerkin' emerged in 2009, driven by the New Boyz rap song "You're a Jerk." The song spread virally through MySpace before the group had management or a record deal. After Los Angeles radio station Power 106 heard about the song and hired the New Boyz to perform at local high schools, it entered radio playlists. Journalist Jeff Weiss of LA Weekly described jerkin' as "For a youth culture weaned on the cult of individualism, jerkin' is its apotheosis." Krumping was created in the early 2000s in South Central, Los Angeles by Ceasare "Tight Eyez" Willis and Jo'Artis "Big Mijo" Ratti. Its predecessor, clowning, was created in 1992 by Thomas "Tommy the Clown" Johnson, who performed with face paint at birthday parties. Krumping replaced that playfulness with highly energetic battles. The krumping documentary Rize screened at several film festivals before its commercial release in the summer of 2005.

• 6. Television and Film

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  Soul Train, the syndicated music variety show that premiered in 1970, was the first major broadcast home for hip-hop dance. Its 36-year run featured a recurring segment called the Soul Train Line, in which dancers formed two lines facing each other and each took a turn dancing down the middle. In 1982, street dancer Jeffrey Daniel performed popping and the backslide during a live performance of "A Night to Remember" on the British television show Top of the Pops. This was the first time popping appeared on British television. A year later, Michael Jackson performed the backslide during the Motown 25 TV special, called it the moonwalk, and spread its popularity worldwide. It was Daniel who had taught Jackson the move. The early hip-hop films Wild Style, Beat Street, and Breakin' were all made in the 1980s. Beat Street was released in West Germany in 1984 and screened at the Cannes Film Festival, helping introduce breaking, graffiti writing, and turntablism to European audiences. In 1985, Yuen Woo-ping directed a hip-hop themed romantic comedy in Hong Kong called Mismatched Couples starring Donnie Yen. That same year, Electro Rock was released in the United Kingdom, featuring a then-14-year-old Hanifa "Bubbles" McQueen Hudson, described as the UK's first b-girl. America's Best Dance Crew, created by Hip Hop International founders Howard and Karen Schwartz, premiered in 2008 and brought crews like Jabbawockeez to national visibility. The JabbaWockeeZ later performed a show called MÜS.I.C. at the Monte Carlo Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, the first hip-hop dance stage show on the Las Vegas Strip. Saigon Electric, Vietnam's first hip-hop film, won a Golden Kite Prize in 2012 for both Best Film and Best Actress.

• 7. Global Competitions and Education

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  UK B-Boy Championships was founded by DJ Hooch in 1996 in London, and its world finals include a "Fresh Awards" category for best dressed, judged every year by Richard "Crazy Legs" Colón of Rock Steady Crew. Hip Hop International, founded in 2002 by Howard and Karen Schwartz, runs a World Hip Hop Dance Championship with divisions for junior dancers ages 8 to 12, varsity dancers ages 13 to 17, adults 18 and over, and mega crews of 15 to 40 members. For the 2009 competition, 120 crews from 30 countries competed. Juste Debout was founded in 2002 by Bruce Ykanji in Paris. Breaking is deliberately excluded from its categories to focus attention on styles performed while standing upright; the name is French for "Just Standing." In 2008, Ingrid "Shéyen" Gamboa, the editor-in-chief of Juste Debout magazine, wrote Hip-hop: L'histoire de la danse. Urban Dance Camp is a six-week German-based convention held in Lörrach, a small town on the border of France and Switzerland; its manager, Bettina Kraft, estimated in a local report that 85% of participants came from outside Germany. On the education side, Safi Thomas founded the Hip-Hop Dance Conservatory in New York City in 2004 with a three-year curriculum combining dance classes in breaking, freestyle, and locking with academic subjects like dance theory, physiology, and kinesiology. Three years later, the University of East London's Center for Performing Arts Development began the only bachelor's degree program in the world specializing in hip-hop, urban, and global dance forms. That program also lasts three years and includes African dance, kathak, Bollywood, and capoeira alongside hip-hop. DJ Hooch's 2011 book B-Boy Championships: From Bronx to Brixton maps the full journey of competitive breaking from the streets of New York to the global stage.