Street dance

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is missing citations or needs footnotes. Please help add inline citations to guard against copyright violations and factual inaccuracies. (July 2008)

Street dance, also called vernacular dance^[1] is an umbrella term, used to describe dance styles that evolved outside of dance studios in everyday spaces such as streets, school yards and nightclubs. They are often improvisational and social in nature, encouraging interaction and contact with the spectators and the other dancers.

Street dance is also commonly used specifically for the many hip hop and funk dance styles that began appearing in the United States in the 1970s, and are still alive and evolving within hip hop culture today: breakdance, popping, locking, hip hop new style, house dance and electro dance. These dances are popular as a form of physical exercise, an art form, and for competition, and are today practiced both at dance studios and other spaces. Some schools use street dance as a form of physical education.

Contents 1 Competitions 2 Styles 3 See also 4 References 5 External links

[edit] Competitions

Today, serious street dance competitions are increasingly popular, and a number of large annual international events are taking place around the world, such as Battle of the Year, Juste Debout and House Dance International. These contests focus mainly on judged battles but also on choreographed shows.

[edit] Styles

Some of the most famous street dance styles of today, such as breakdance, popping and locking, began appearing around the 1970s; hip hop new style and house dance around the 1980s in New York and Los Angeles; and electro dance around 2000 in France. Though some of these styles originally evolved separately, most of them are today associated with the hip hop scene, as they share many street dance elements.

More recently, new street dance styles are emerging that are further inspired by hip hop and its music. Krumping, with its focus on highly energetic battles and movements, is an example of such a style that just recently became publicly known. It's also common to see some characteristics of street dance being mixed with other more traditional dance forms, creating styles such as street jazz, a hybrid of modern hip hop styles and jazz dance. Such styles are generally focused more on choreography and performance and less on improvisation and battles, and are not always considered pure street dances, though a popular alternative to the more traditional and classical styles of studio dancing.

In Jamaica, Dancehall music, which is the contemporary version to Reggae, has spawned its own street dances. The movement has gathered momentum within the last five years where every day a new dance is being tested on the streets.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] See also

• African American dance
• Rock Steady Crew

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• "Dancing on the Through-Line: Rennie Harris and the Past and Future of Hip-Hop Dance" by Jeff Chang; from the series Democratic Vistas Profiles: Essays in the Arts and Democracy

Street dance
Breakdancing - Hip hop dance - Krumping - Liquid dancing - Locking - Popping - Robot - Tutting - Uprock