By Lysander Tiu
Street dance culture builds community. But, community without understanding and care for the art it builds is just plain ignorance.
Many dance styles we see today were birthed from the underground scene. Like in the clubs where waacking, vogueing, and house began, or in the streets where locking, popping, and krumping originated. They were their own separate cultures informed by specific genres of their own communities.
However, Western societies were quick to take this culture and commercialize it from non-Western cultures during the early 20th centuries. This is cultural appropriation. It is anything that takes from another culture out of context and to use it for personal gain. Nowadays, you have many instances of people and groups of people actively violating this principle.
Dancers have done modern blackface to imitate black people and fashion or costume such as do-rags, dashikis, cornrows, hand gestures, or idiosyncrasies like throwing gang signs despite not being from that area or experiencing its lived culture. To put it simply, using anything not from your culture, and without proper knowledge about it, will result in cultural appropriation.
Worse still, people that teach a class or workshop that’s labelled as hiphop without it having to do with actual hiphop culture, such as making up style descriptions that don’t really apply to hiphop, is yet another facet we have to talk about. This goes hand-in-hand with learning the culture not from a narcissistic or classist point of view, but entering this culture not through studios or classes with the mindset of just dancing, but understanding why we dance.
This matters because street dance is a culture and not a costume—you can’t pretend to have a lived experience of it. This culture, of course, is meant to be shared but it also has to be a mutual understanding. This culture is meant to be loved, hiphop is meant to be loved, and street dance should be loved, but the way you love it is just as important. You cannot love something you claim to love in an oppressive or degrading way, because you’re making it about you and not the culture.
Should you have awareness of this culture? Should you bear a portion of that responsibility? Should you love not only yourself but also those who are in that culture as well? We should always be going deeper to understand different perspectives from ours, especially those that we may not necessarily understand, but should make a conscious effort to do so. If not, we will fail to grasp how a culture embodies and connects—the essence of it beyond what we see on our phones.
We will miss the reasons why dancers—these artists—created this culture the way it was meant to be appreciated.
