Hip-Hop

In 1976 some house parties in the Bronx, NYC gave rise to a phenomenon that is still shaping culture today. Hip-Hop tends to borrow from existing sources: a DJ takes samples and beats from songs and mixes them together to create a new sound score; the MC or rapper borrows from West African folk poets and Jamaican musicians who have been reciting rhymes over percussive beats for centuries; beatboxing stems from ska and scat in jazz; fashion samples from impoverished and even imprisoned human populations; graffiti borrows surfaces other than conventional canvases and displays in unconventional "galleries", but borrows from numerous established and conventional techniques.  But since this is PE, our investigation of Hip-Hop will focus primarily on dancing, which draws from West African dance, East African dance, Capoeira, Jitterbug, gymnastics, and so much more.  At the core, Hip-Hop dance is street dance.

Our use of Hip-Hop is designed to foster strength, coordination, muscle and movement memories, strength, stamina, speed, awareness and rhythm, but also gives us a chance to support creativity, innovation, risk taking and management, and self-expression.

Hip-Hop has been so successful that in just 37 years that the influences can be felt globally.  The "open source" nature of hip-hop, a form that freely borrows from existing forms, allows it to fluidly be adapted by young people world-wide.  Hip Hop is a fusion.  There is salsa-infused Hip-Hop, Jazzy Hip-Hop, Balletic Hip-Hop, Tap-infused Hip-Hop, Bollywood Hip-Hop, even Hula-heavy Hip-Hop.  There is a Hip-Hop movement vocabulary, but there is also an expectation that a dancer manipulates, alters, and varies the vocabulary to establish a unique signature, style, or "trademark".  Take a move and innovate a new way to do it to impress all the b-boys/b-girls in your "crew" or at the "battle".  If you take a move but never make it your own, you are "biting".  You can "bite", but you then have to "flip it" (innovate something new in it or do it your own unique way).

So why Hip-Hop?  Isn't is a celebration of bling and conquest?  Hip-Hop is a reflection of culture as much as it is a culture to in itself.  If a culture celebrates bling and conquest, so will the art generated therein.  If the culture embraces innovation, creativity, self-expression, physical and mental flexibility, whole-bodied health, that is reflected in the art.