Hip Hop

Hip hop is a form of musical expression and artistic subculture that originated in African-American and Hispanic-American communities during the 1970's in New York City, especially in the Bronx. The range of movement includes breaking, locking and popping, which have been made popular by dance crews in the United States. "Breaking"'s earliest form began as an elaboration on James Brown's "Good Foot" dance, which came out in 1972. While breaking was emerging in New York, other styles were developing in California. The funk styles refers to several steet dance styles created in California in the 1970s that were dance to funk music. These styles include roboting, bopping, hitting, locking, bustin', popping, electic boogaloo, strutting, sac-ing, dime-stopping etc. African Americans Don Campbell and Sam Solomon created the most popular and widely spread styles of popping and locking which spread through the television show Soul Train. I have recently become very fascinated with lyrical hip hop, through So You Think You Can Dance and through some of the play's choreography. Lyrical hip-hop is a fluid and more interpretive version of hip-hop. According to British hip-hop choreographer Kate Prince, it is "hip-hop with emotion." The term was first coined by Adam Shankman, a judge and choreographer for So You Think You Can Dance. Here is a definition of lyrical hip-hop from Dance Spirit magazine: "What makes lyrical hip hop unique is that your dance movements have to tell a story to the lyrics of a song. Expect isolations (especially of the chest), slow, fluid movements (like gliding and body waves) and contemporary-inspired turns (but not pirouettes). There’s popping, but not the hard-hitting kind. Dancers are meant to look like they’re unwinding, unraveling and floating." I think my attraction to hip hop in general stems from my lack of training. Hip hop has always been something that I could do with my sense of rhythm, regardless of my inability to double pirouette or fouetté. Lyrical hip hop combines knowledge I have acquired from modern dance classes and emotional techniques I have learned from acting classes with my innate hip hop instincts. Hip hop, along with other dance styles, is a wonderful energy release. Sometimes throwing myself around jerkily helps express myself more than with pointed toes and a straight back. Here are a couple of videos of lyrical hip hop and regular hip hop. The second video is from my favorite hip hop company Mega Jam.


Chelsie & Mark: Bleeding Love


Telephone: Mega Jam

Parson's Dance Company

   Parsons Dance is a contemporary dance company founded by choreographer David Parsons. Based in New  York City, Parsons Dance was founded on July 17, 1985 by David Parsons and lighting designer Howell Binkley. Since its founding, Parsons has toured six continents. It is also the only dance company in history to perform at all three Spoleto Festivals (Italy, Australia and the US) in a single season.Since 1985, Parsons Dance has toured an average of 32 weeks per year, to a total of more than 235 cities, 30 countries, six continents and millions of audience members. The company consists of eleven full-time dancers.The Company members are: Abby Silva Gavezzoli, Miquel Quinones III, Emily Daly, Ian Spring, Melissa Ullom, Maria Elena D'Amario, Sarah Braverman, Christina Ilisije, Eric Bourne,Jason Macdonald, and Steven Vaughn. 

   It maintains a repertory of more than 70 works, twenty of which feature commissioned original scores by composers and musicians including Dave Matthews, Michael Gordon and Milton Nascimento. Parsons Dance has collaborated with many other artists, including Julie Taymor, William Ivey Long, Annie Leibovitz, Donna Karan and Alex Katz. David Parsons is both the choreographer and the artistic director, and his assistant artistic director is Elizabeth Koeppen. Parsons Dance has been seen on PBS, Bravo, A&E and the Discovery Channel. Millions watched worldwide as Parsons Dance performed live in New York’s Times Square, as part of the internationally broadcast, 24-hour Millennium New Year’s Eve celebration on December 31, 1999.

   What draws me to this company is its timelessness. From founding, it has made huge steps internationally and has been on the dance scene for over thirty years. Its ability to stay on top for so long shows how creatively impressive David Parsons is. The piece that I am posting is a duet that was performed in Bryant Partk NYC last year. One aspect of this piece is that it transitions from soft and smooth to sharp and fast very quickly. The transitions are abrupt but fitting. At the end of this piece the company performs whilst someone sings onstage. This piece is called "Remember Me" and it is one of their most famous pieces and is performed quite frequently. But the singing on stage is something that Parsons experiements with often. Parsons is known for its work with musicians.

Strenths and Weaknesses

     Having taken dance from a young age, I would consider my strengths to be coordination and rhythm. Even when I was not taking a dance class as a youngster, I was always dancing around the house to the Jackson 5, or choreographing musical numbers with my friends. While my technique has not been perfected by years of intense training, my rhythm and coordination is more natural, and it comes from somewhere other than training. These qualities have helped me pick up choreography over the years fairly easily. Even if it takes me three months to finally nail down a double pirouette (as it did last year), I can pick up the timing and general movement of choreography easily. I don't know how this ever came to be a trait of mine. It probably sprouted from my inability to live life without music. In my car, before I go to sleep, during study halls, I am always surrounding myself with music, and new beats and rhythms. It is also impossible for me to listen to a song without seeing it sung or performed to in my head. So I am constantly making connections between sounds and movement, and over the years, it seems to have developed into an instinctual habit. My weaknesses on the other hand are plentiful.
     Some of the most obvious weaknesses are my terrible performance face, which looks like the cover of a horror film DVD (I literally look like I am going to kill someone), or my initail self-consciouness when I learn a new dance. While my scary face is never intentional, it frequently hinders me. Especially with musical theater, when it is an actor's job to be expressive and upbeat. I am a happy person, don't get me wrong, but for some reason, when I dance, I look like I am possessed by some dance demon. It has come in handy in the past, like during the witch dance in last year's spring play, Dark of the Moon, but nevertheless it is an issue. But my largest weakness in dance is self-consciousness. As an actor, I am constantly forced to push out of my comfort zone, and I jump into this forcefully, not afraid to make mistakes, knowing that failure is the place where success is born. But for some reason when I dance it is harder to push that limit. I am not afraid to look silly, because I do this on a daily basis without someone telling me to, so I am not sure where this self-consciousness comes from. It may be that I think that since I lack serious training, I don't know what I'm doing, which is false. But I am working hard to change this. For example, the other day in class I almost fell over during an across the floor combination because I finally pushed myself. Even though it was messy, it showed me that I need to take more risks in order to improve, and I intend to do so.

What is dance?

When most people hear the word "dance," they envision a little girl in a tutu or Natalie Portman losing her mind in Black Swan. They don't realize that dance is both a challenging sport and a beautiful art. For me, dance is vehicle for expression. It enables me to express through movement things that are incapable of saying. Every year on So You Think You Can Dance, there are pieces that bring us to tears, make us smile and feel giddy, and pieces that simply make us want to get up and dance with the contestants. Like music, and theater,singing, photography, sketching or painting, dance is another art. It is a creative release that can enrage, enlighten and even heal. One of my favorite pieces from this year on SYTYCD was the piece with Melanie and the "star," Neil, choreographed by Mandy Moore. In this piece, Melanie took an unbelievable leap of faith (physically and emotionally), and threw herself across a huge portion of the stage into Neil's arms. This is a perfect example of another thing that dance can provide: trust. Dancers have to develop relationships built on trust and loyalty. Like athletes and teammates, there is a comradery that is developed over time. I think part of this trust is built because when we dance, we have to share a part of ourselves that we sometimes want to hide. Art in all forms can be a mode of therapy. What I love about dance is that, even if it is just for 40 minutes every morning, when I am in the studio, nothing else matters. And while I have so much to worry about with college and school and whatever else, it doesn't matter for A period. The studio is safe haven where the only thing that is important is the present. As a lover of the arts, and a hard-core thespian, I have learned over the years how important expression is. Some people express through ramming into another athlete with all of their body weight, some people draw skulls and weapons, and some people choose to move to the beat. It's the personal melody and spontaneity that make it exciting.


Melanie and Neil