Hip Hop Dance

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9eronBc-VE

This is a preview of a hip hop performance at the Moore Theater in Seattle, Washington. Directly correlated with the Seattle Theater Group, “Dance This” is a camp and group of high school dancers that come together to perform many different styles of dance. This program welcomes and encourages students from grades 9-12 at any level of dance experience to learn styles and techniques in dancing and performing art. This is a non-profit art program where dancers, performers, and choreographers can come together to share culture and talent through dance. It is renewed each year and new members are welcomed to join and perform new dances. While the “Dance This” camp focuses on many different styles of dance, including ballet, jazz, salsa, etc, I chose to focus on the hip hop performance titled “Orchestrate The Groove” they gave in 2007 because it is a passion of mine that I can relate well with. I found this work on YouTube, and previewed the full version of this dance as well, which is just an expanded and more complex piece to what I have chose to view in class.

When finding an aesthetically pleasing piece of art for this assignment, I knew that I wanted to find a dance clip, in particular hip hop, because I personally find it so entertaining and a beautiful example of art. This performance is so unique because it contained people of different cultures and dance backgrounds who came together to create this work of art. I am a hip hop dancer myself, and could relate well to this performance because just like them, I am taught new choreography, how to work and sync with others for a performance, and how to show and produce emotion in my dance to evoke emotion in the audience or viewers minds. I found it so fascinating that not all of these dancers were experienced and some had never danced before. Knowing this made it that much better because I could tell how much effort and work went into the preparation for the performance.

Unlike paintings or sculptures that have annotated blurbs about the content within them, a dance piece is left open to the viewers interpretations of what is happening. Dance is like ‘not having the background information before looking at a painting’ because you are required to look and see within the piece to find the meaning of it. This dance is somewhat easier in determining the meaning because there are lyrics in the song that the dancers relate moves to. Also, the expression and emotions the dancers portray give the viewer a sense of how to feel when viewing the piece and how the music makes you feel because it puts you in that particular mood. With the remix of songs in this performance, the dancers are expressing the lyrics of the songs and are telling a story through the words and their dance. The choreographers’ (Napoleon Tabitha D'umo and Daniel Cruz) technique to help the viewers understand what was being expressed was to use many different songs to incorporate variety and word usage in their dance.

In my opinion, this is clearly art because it took both the dancers and the choreographers’ skill and effort to learn and create and perform the dance. They are able to evoke emotion in the viewers (whether it is positive or negative) and make them find some sort of meaning or reasoning behind the dance. While I feel it is important to these artists that they receive an emotion from the viewers, I think the “Quartet of Tradition” that this would be categorized under would be the formalist theory. Because the dance performance itself has no real context or meaning besides the words brought to the piece, and the reasons behind each of the dancer’s intent is unimportant, it seems that the way this dance was made and how the artists formed a performance out of their moves defines this piece of art. It is valued with aesthetic properties because it informs the viewers of a story through by the visual aspects used, and the way the viewers can envision the story. But could it be considered under another one of Anderson’s theories?

I’ve noticed that both in the world around us and our classroom, in particular, we seem to judge art based on our own relation to it and whether we can define it as art or not. What I mean is that I define this performance as art because I am a dancer, and can relate what I do and what they are doing to a form of art. Other students might think otherwise because it doesn’t flat out describe what is being told and doesn’t have a purpose in mind. So my question to you all is…do you think we are more subjective to art we don’t know or can’t relate with? Do we tend to question the unfamiliar forms of art because we can’t, ourselves, see what the purpose behind it is?

Sources:

Dance This… “Orchestrate The Groove.” 2007. Online video clip. YouTube. Accessed on 19 October 2009. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9eronBc-VE

"Young Artists at Centrum: DANCE This." Centrum: Washington's home for artists and audiences. 26 Oct. 2009 .