Whether you are a New Yorker who stops by to watch or scurries through the audience- forming a crowd on the sidewalk, street dance is as ingrained into the city’s culture as dollar slices or curb alerts on Craigslist. Breaking, a form of street dance, originated in the Bronx amongst African American and Puerto Rican communities in the 1970s. It was an improvised, social form of dance used to react against the highbrow refined dance that was popular in the mainstream culture (Maxwell). Breakers often performed at clubs, parks, and on streets. This style of dance contributed to an alternative hip-hop culture to arise whose main elements were MCing, DJing, graffiti, and of course b-boying, which we now call breakdancing (Page).   

      One of the most influential elements of hip-hop was Jamaican dub music, a subgenre of reggae, which was instrumental versions of popular reggae songs produced for clubs. These instrumental versions better suited dancers because of their isolated beats, intense percussion, and heavy baselines. DJs were pivotal figures in the shaping of street dance culture, exemplified by the Bronx being divided into territories that were run by different DJs. There was, “Afrika Bambaataa in the southeast, DJ Kool Herc in the west, and Grandmaster Flash in the center,” (Page).

      The dancers at DJ Kool Herc’s parties coined the term “breakdancer” because of their style of saving their best dance moves for the break section of a song. Some other elements of hip-hop dance, independent from breakdancing, are, “popping, locking, hitting, ticking, boogaloo and other funk styles that evolved independently during the late 20th century,” (Page). Once mainstream media took ahold of the hip-hop culture, including the fashion, the slang, and the music, popping and locking was linked to breakdancing, thought the two originated in California, not New York (BBC). However, all these styles of dance were used to channel anger, aggression, and frustration against the oppression faced by those communities in large, inequitable, urban cities.

References:

Maxwell, Kerry. “Buzzword: Street Dance.” Macmillan Publishers, www.macmillandictionary.com/buzzword/entries/street-dance.html.

Page, Denise. “The History of Street Dance.” MyGroupFit, www.mygroupfit.com/printeducationarticle.aspx?article=3417.

“The History of Hip-Hop Dance.” BBC, 24 April. 2015, www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/5CWQyWXZ4p7hr6NxG2L5qG9/the-history-of-hip-hop-dance.