CH.12 BLACK CULTURE WITHOUT BLACK PEOPLE HIP-HOP DANCE

CH.12 BLACK CULTURE WITHOUT BLACK
PEOPLE / HIP-HOP DANCE BEYOND
APPROPRIATION DISCOURSE
Imani Kai Johnson
Cultural appropriation is currently a prominent topic of dis-
cussion, and at any given moment there are readily available
examples of it
in mainstream pop culture. From such infamous examples as
Rachel Dolezal
and her performed blackness to predictable practices like
dressing up in eth-
nic costuming at Halloween or at frat parties, accusations of
appropriation
are actually being heard and discussions are gaining traction.1
When I first
started drafting this essay, Iggy Azalea’s appropriation of hip
hop— from her
“blackcent” to her ignorance of its history— led to demands for
greater ac-
countability to the culture and the broader community.2 While
these dis-
cussions have not been exhausted, joining these debates seems
exhausting
because they are so oversimplified that people end up
repeating themselves
to those with no stake in listening. Therein lies the strugg le. In
my own work
on breaking (also known as b- boying or breakdancing), the

appropriation
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192 imani kai Johnson
discussion is complicated by the realities of the culture itself:
though born
of African diasporic practices, it is a worldwide phenomenon
dominated by
nondiasporic prac ti tion ers whose whole lives have been
shaped by hip- hop
culture. Appropriation is not enough.
To appropriate speaks to both the fact of something being taken
and to
its being taken up in a certain kind of way: with the power to do
so un-
critically and unethically. Simply put, appropriation is
colonialism at the
scale of the dancing body or the sacred ritual object, its life and
dynamism
reduced to a thing for consumption or a costume for play.
Though not
exactly “theft”— and I am wary of thinking of culture through
the lens of
cap i tal ist owner ship— the presumption that one has the right
to stake a
claim to something and use it, buy and sell it, misrepresent it,
and rewrite

its history is colonial logic at work. With that said,
appropriation only ad-
dresses one type of cross- cultural per for mance, one that
perpetuates systems
of power that marginalizes and excludes.
We are in a time when many millennials already know that
appropria-
tion is “problematic” or that they might get “dragged” on social
media for
it. Videos and articles from mtv and Teen Vogue distinguishing
between ap-
propriation and appreciation, while annual articles decrying
black- , brown- ,
red- , and yellowface costumes attest to the changing terrain.3
The clearest
message in these forums is that it is wrong, and millennials
appear to hear
the message. What follows that ac cep tance though?
This question comes out of informal discussions during a
lecture wherein
my students already know what not to do, yet still question what
it means
when appropriation is not enough. I am interested in nurturing a
discourse
that attends to cross- cultural per for mances that are related to
but diff er ent
from appropriation, and possibly finding language that moves
with, along-
side, and yet away from appropriation (yes! like a dance).
There is a differ-
ence between staking a claim to a culture (i.e., appropriation)
and the cul-
ture’s staking a claim to you, possessing you, moving you in
unfamiliar and

possibly uncomfortable ways that become essential to a person’s
existence.
Hip- hop dance lends itself to expanding that discourse
precisely because the
spectrum of cross- racial per for mances is embodied evidence
of something
else. Thus this essay is not about appropriation, but about
thinking of ap-
propriation as part of a spectrum rather than a binary.
Within and across dance forms, movement communicates and
transmits
knowledge that allows people of diff er ent nationalities,
ethnicities, and races
to speak to one another less encumbered by the limits of verbal
language.
This matters in hip hop because, as I have argued in other
work, breaking
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black culture without black PeoPle 193
is fundamentally informed by Africanist aesthetics even as the
faces of
breaking are largely of those who are not recognized or might
not identify
as being of the African diaspora.4 With par tic u lar attention on
the dance
circle, known as the cypher, key ele ments of Africanist

aesthetics are organ-
izing sensibilities.5 In cyphers, one embodies lessons in call
and response,
polyrhythms, improvisation, trickster practices, and spiritual
communion
not merely as features of the culture but as fundamental
dimensions to the
practice itself. In learning how to cypher, one embodies
Africanist aesthetics
so much so that they may also acquire a legible understanding
of aspects of
other African diasporic ritual practices as well. Prac ti tion ers
though identify
themselves as hip hop (sometimes as hip hopppas, breakers, and
the like).
They recognize that with these identities come some degree of
playing in
and with African diasporic cultural ele ments, and thus
blackness. Appro-
priation suggests that there is no cultural education in such per
for mances.
My ongoing research on breaking culture tells a diff er ent
story, one that rec-
ognizes the capacity for dance to articulate a broader range of
experiences
than appropriation alone addresses.
While there are still places where black breakers figure
prominently (cit-
ies like Philadelphia and Paris, countries like South Africa and
Uganda), anx-
i eties about claiming breaking’s Africanist aesthetics
comingles a dearth of
black breakers with a fear of participating in a lineage of
minstrelsy despite
a commitment to hip hop— which still carries counter

hegemonic politics
despite its mainstream life. Shifting our attention to hip- hop
dance means
recognizing how cultural literacy and practice- based expertise
are meaning-
ful components of how bodies physically move in and through
the world. If,
as is the case in many communities, the manner by which you
move your
body demonstrates who your people are, then how does hip hop
move people
both literally and positionally in relation to blackness?
There are other terms that have been used (e.g., cultural
exchange, cul-
tural borrowing), yet they don’t feel satisfying. “Borrowing”
feels transitory,
and “exchange” suggests a level playing field or equal sociopo
liti cal standing,
which is not always the case. Perhaps, though, a precise
glossary of terms is
not a satisfactory resolution anyway. What I am leaning toward
is activating
the nuance and specificity of experience through language that
resists blur-
ring the meaning of appropriation.
This essay is an exploration of dance and its discursive
possibilities in
understanding the convergence of race, per for mance, hip hop,
and Afri-
canist aesthetics practiced worldwide. I attempt to build on
similar work from
other scholars and bring their approaches to bear on my central
questions.

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What are the social politics of nondiasporic peoples embodying
and circu-
lating aesthetic sensibilities of the African diaspora? What is at
stake when
this happens in the absence of black bodies? This piece builds
on work that
attempts to move through, with, and past appropriation to look
to hip hop’s
own cultural imperatives in order to facilitate a language that
speaks to the
nuanced complexity of cultural exposure, exchange, and
belonging.
When Appropriation Is Not Enough
When breaking hit mainstream Amer i ca in the early 1980s, it
was fre-
quently labeled a “black dance,” not because it was solely
practiced by
African Americans but because of the way that blackness
signified in pop
culture. Multiple mainstream articles introducing its audiences
to hip hop
consistently represented prac ti tion ers as young, male, and
black, while oc-
casionally mentioning Puerto Ricans or Hispanics as secondary

or paren-
thetical members of a “black youth.” For example, in a 1983
Time magazine
article titled, “Chilling Out on Rap Flash,” Latino and white
participants
are prominent in the colorful pictures spreading across the
opening pages.
Yet the author only refers to their blackness. This was not an
oversight;
the author is not referring to national identity. Blackness
signified the fear
and titillation captured in the article’s references to gangs, vio
lence, crime,
and a new style of cool.6 Blackness was marked by the fact that
it was a
street dance dominated by African diasporic youth coming out
of urban,
working- class neighborhoods. That it was literally practiced on
the street,
outside of the institutions wherein dance is “supposed” to take
place, is also
symbolic of its otherness.7 Breaking traveled with an aura of
blackness that
signaled coolness, youth culture, and counternarratives of
socioeconomic
marginalization that together contextualizes much of the black
cultural
production evident in pop culture.
In the mid-1980s, hip- hop films helped propagate narrow
notions of black-
ness while also buttressing a developing discourse of breaking’s
multicultur-
alism in par tic u lar. Its selling point became its diversity,
which still carries a
sense of social possibility. As a consequence, blackness gets

discursively resitu-
ated as both a source of innovative foundation and a racializing
limitation,
or the straw man to the promise of multiculturalism wherein
race is po liti-
cally meaningless costuming, “a kind of difference that doesn’t
make a differ-
ence of any kind.”8 While Wild Style (1983) gave us a peak
into a still unknown
culture, the commercial success of Flashdance (also 1983) and
its two- minute
scene featuring the Rock Steady Crew inspired youth
nationwide and soon
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around the world. The multiracial and multiethnic group of
young teen-
age boys dancing on cardboard in an alley surrounded by adults
of diff er ent
races clapping along set a pre ce dence. Other films followed
suit, depicting
stories of a multicultural group of sometimes poor, ghetto kids
doing good
through hip hop, like Beat Street (1984), Breakin’ (1984), and
Breakin’ 2: Electric
Boogaloo (1984). Minor films like Body Rock (1984), Flash
Forward (1985), and

Delivery Boys (1985) also showcased moments of breaking
among either mul-
ticultural or largely white groups. Black and white racial
relations played a
key role in some of these works, especially in the popu lar
Breakin’ franchise,
whose central character Kelly— a white, upper- class modern
dancer— sees
a streetdance circle and decides to learn in hopes of
distinguishing herself
from other modern dancers to further her career. With very
little actual
breaking in it (popping and locking are showcased primarily),
Breakin’ uses
the bodies of streetdancers of color to shore up the film’s
authenticity and
mask Kelly’s lack of skills. (Versions of this formula resurface
in the Step Up
franchise [2006–17].)
Popu lar storylines reek of appropriation and perpetuate
narratives of
newly welcomed white interlocutors who happily attempt to
translate
a culture that they have often just learned about for the
consumption of
mainstream audiences both within the films and literally at the
box office.
In these narratives, white people are typically the
intermediaries between
the subculture and the mainstream, thereby making it clear that
signifiers of
blackness (e.g., poor neighborhoods, black and brown prac ti
tion ers, urban
styles of dress and gesture, etc.) were performative not
substantive. Simply

put, in pop culture repre sen ta tions of black culture center ed
on nonblack
people is our erasure; it is appropriation. Beyond these
fictional narratives,
though, are lived experiences of exchange that complicate these
stories.
For example, I presented an earlier draft of this article at
Emory Univer-
sity in 2016, and following the q&a I was approached by a
young Chinese
American b- boy from Chicago, now going to college in the
South.9 He asked
me how, within this po liti cal moment of Black Lives Matter
activism, he and
his largely white and Asian American crew should hold
themselves po liti-
cally accountable while loving and practicing an art born in
black and brown
urban, working- class communities? Additionally, going to
college in Atlanta
made him hyperaware of his own lack of connection to any
black commu-
nity, while espousing a history that he knew came from them.
This tension
compelled him to stay humble, especially in the face of his own
urge to judge
the growing competitive collegiate hip- hop “choreo” scene.10
That is, to him.
choreo did little to acknowledge hip- hop streetdance histories
or connect
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to its current community- based manifestations, yet the choreo
scene is also
heavi ly Asian American in practice, forcing him to confront a
version of hip-
hop culture that was both an affront to his sense of cultural
responsibility,
and a mirror of his own anx i eties about cultural appropriation.
I have worked with several students involved in choreo. A
young, white,
queer undergrad created a video proj ect that paid homage to the
form and
expressed his love and commitment to his team and its found
ers. In a class I
taught on global hip- hop dance documentaries, two women
active in cam-
pus choreo (one black, one white) activated those experiences
to engage the
course materials. An indigenous woman form New Zealand was
also in the
class and explained that videos of an Australian hip- hop choreo
team ex-
posed her to hip- hop dance before coming to the States. I began
to recognize
that for women, queer, and international students choreo teams
offered a
place to enter and join communities of practice that supported
their jour-
neys through college life. They too understood that
appropriation is bad,

but nonetheless one asked, “But there’s good appropriation too,
right?,” with
a desire to understand how to account for his appreciation of
and commit-
ment to their campus teams. Appropriation does not exhaust our
under-
standing of per for mances that traverse sociocultural and racial
bound aries.
Again, for these college prac ti tion ers, Africanist aesthetics
are embodied,
not costumes.
While my students helped clarify my questions, Dark Marc
really embod-
ied my strugg le with appropriation. Dark Marc was a funky
dancer whose
musicality and soulfulness were as unexpected as his name.
When I first
saw him one Saturday after noon at a dark New York City club
in 2006, the
then twenty- four- year old, 5′9,″ blond- haired Scandinavian
man shimmied
and bounced his way into the circle to James Brown’s “Give It
Up, Turn It
Loose.” He ignored the emcee’s double- take when the name
“Dark Marc”
was announced, and his talent got spectators on his side. He
nonetheless
suspected that when people said that he danced well for a
“white boy,” it
was a backhanded compliment. As far as his name was
concerned, he chose
it after watching Star Wars, alluding to “the dark side,” arguing
(however
naïvely) that Scandinavians did not immediately associate
“dark” with skin

color.11 He intended no offense; he just thought it was cool.
Yet in New
York, though white breakers are common, Dark Marc’s
whiteness stood out
because of his name.12 As a consequence, he became a nexus
of discourses on
race, national difference, hip- hop culture, and an appropriation
of blackness
itself— discourses that linger beneath the surface of the scene
but do not
often take center stage.
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Ultimately, East Coast audiences appreciated his capacity to
groove in
synchronous harmony with the music rather than to just do a
bunch of
breaking moves to impress the judges without regard for the
song. In an in-
terview in 2006, Dark Marc told me how his appreciation for
funk, soul,
rock, and jazz music developed out of his having grown up
listening to his
father’s rec ord collection— some of which has since been
canonized among
breakers— and appreciating James Brown the most.13 His
father, a drummer,

had a vast rec ord collection, and Dark Marc got a distinct
education from it.
Embedded in his personal history are lessons that lent
themselves to break-
ing. One came from learning drumming at a young age, which
taught him
about polyrhythms in a black music. A second lesson came
from exposure to
musicians jamming at parties in his home, which facilitated an
understand-
ing of improvisation, another central Africanist aesthetic.
These details are
neither prescriptive nor indicative of a kind of exceptionalism,
but par tic-
u lar to Dark Marc’s specific experiences with black aesthetics
in music and
dance before and subsequently within breaking.
In New York, though, Dark Marc activated several points of
tension that
could be analyzed just in reference to the “You dance good for a
white boy”
comment. Instead I want to pay attention to his relationship to
breaking.
Like other breakers around the world, Dark Marc did not just do
the dance;
he lived as a b- boy. He saved money to travel, he competed in
battles for
international re spect, and he pushed himself to create and
express himself
within the form, while continuing to learn the dance’s history
because it
was his history too. And that is what gave me initial pause.
When I met him,
he had traveled to New York City to learn firsthand about the
roots of his

adopted culture, a shared history with African diasporic,
working- class
American communities. He went to the South Bronx and
Brooklyn to
learn from first- and second- generation breakers and
uprockers, these days
mostly older Puerto Rican men, to teach him about his adopted
culture.14
In my interview with him, Dark Marc goes into some of those
lessons, par-
ticularly around the rock dance, a battle dance born in New
York (some
say Brooklyn; some say the Bronx) where breaking adopts its
toprock or
upright dancing style.
Dm: People, I think, people that know, older people that can
really see if you
know what you’re doing, or if you just do it because you seen
someone
else doing it. If you know the history behind the move and
you know
the meaning of the move, you do it with much more . . . I don’t
know
how to say . . . you do it much more, uhh, execution because
then
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you’re sure of what you’re doing. . . . If you know the
meaning behind
a lot of the thing then it’s easier to also create your own style.
Because
that’s maybe one of the most impor tant things, also too: to
learn the
dance, the foundation, and then try to do it your way. And, I
think
a lot of new b- boys that want to try to [say], “Okay, I want to
have
my own style right now.” And then they kind of skip the hard
work
with the foundation stuff. Then they’re original but they don’t
have
no good form, they have terrible form. Like, I think it’s really
impor-
tant to know the history, know how the original move is. And
then it’s
much more easy to make your own out of it.
ikJ: So knowing the history of the moves, does it help you
innovate?
Dm: Yeah. It does help me a lot when I got interested in
rocking. It’s, uh,
let’s say when they do the jerks for instance, it’s seen when b-
boys try
to imitate it as when they go 1-2-3- and-4 and they go down on
the 4
and hit on 2. That’s like the milder version of rocking. And
then, when
I learned what the rockers described . . . that you grab the
opponent
and then breaking them on the hips, and then they went down to
drop

the remaining of the opponent. And then when I learned that I
was
like, “Hmm. That was a cool thing.” Then it helps me to like,
uh, try to
think in diff er ent ways . . . and make it my own. . . . I think
it’s a good
help to like open your mind.
Let me explain. Unlike breaking battles, where one person
enters the circle
at a time and dances in a back- and- forth exchange to
breakbeats, uprockers
form two facing rows and dance against the person standing
opposite them
to entire songs while pantomiming stories of dominating their
opponent.
Not unlike playing the dozens, wherein how you insult is more
impor tant
than the fact of insulting someone, rockers dance out intricate
narratives of
dismemberment, beheadings, shootings, or breaking backs. The
story told
is as creative and expressive as a rocker’s imagination. So when
these moves
are acquired as steps rather than individual stories, a gesture of
breaking
someone at the hips just becomes a squat to the ground.
When Dark Marc talks about learning that the “go down” part is
not in
fact just a part of a count—as if every one should drop on the
4— his self-
assigned history lesson did more than satisfy a curiosity; it
changed how
he understood his own practice. Moreover, it opened his mind to
thinking

differently. This is not to absolve Dark Marc of any
responsibilities that
come with adopting a culture, nor is this a fantasy of transracial
pro gress
through dance. In fact, it is really not even about him. In
meeting him, it
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struck me that if I take Dark Marc’s and my students’ depth of
commitment
to hip- hop dance seriously, then the culture has claimed them.
This alone
compels a shift in discourse because those experiences are
worthy of further
exploration.
Inappropriable Discourse
In an effort to speak to the lived experiences of my
interlocutors, I looked
to work on cultural production (per for mance, fashion, theatre,
ritual) to
offer tools for moving the discussion forward. For example, in
one case study
featured in Appropriating Blackness: Per for mance and the
Politics of Authenticity,
E. Patrick Johnson writes of an all- white Australian gospel

choir— many of
the singers themselves atheists. In an analy sis of the choir’s per
for mance
at a Harlem church, he argues that in one moment they “became
black,”
Johnson’s way of accounting for the sonic achievement of what
gets read
as blackness in the voices of a choir. Some members were so
moved in fact
that they subsequently converted to Chris tian ity. Johnson
provocatively
engages the language of race to speak to what a depth of
performative in-
vestment can make pos si ble. His goal is to make the language
of race and
particularly blackness more porous in order to undermine
notions of au-
thenticity, an essentialist discourse that buttresses intraracial
practices of
exclusion, such as homophobic and heteronormative black
masculinities
that exclude queer- identified black men. Johnson argues for
“embodiment
as a way of ‘knowing’ . . . as a way to disrupt the notion of au
then tic black-
ness.” Embodiment also becomes a precondition for
intersubjectivity and in-
tercultural exchange. Per for mance allows us to see ourselves
in Others and
“engage the Others’ po liti cal, social, and cultural landscape,
and contextu-
ally constituted subjectivities within contested spaces.”15 Thus,
between self
and Other are power ful, dynamic, and transformative liminal
spaces that
per for mance opens up.

While Johnson’s is an explicit engagement with African
diasporic aes-
thetics rather than an implicit engagement mediated by hip hop,
there is
something to considering what embodied practices make pos si
ble. “Becom-
ing black” is not unlike “being hip hop,” which is an
understanding in hip-
hop circles that is all about a deep cultural investment that is
lived every day
and not merely put on for show or for exploitative profit. It is
achievable not
in biology but in practice.
Other approaches to embodied cross- cultural per for mances
can be found
in diff er ent areas of study. For example, Minh- Ha T. Pham’s
discussion of
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appropriation discourse in the fashion industry critiques the
language’s too
easy collapse into binary oppositions (e.g., good/bad,
respectful/not respect-
ful, high/low culture, first/third world), which maintains
existing power

structures even within efforts to critique the fashion industry’s
repeated ap-
propriative transgressions. Pham makes a case for
“inappropriate critique,”
or that which cannot be appropriated while “continu[ing] to
maintain the
existing power structure.”16 In her primary example of a plaid
design promi-
nent among certain mi grant worker groups “poached” for Eu ro
pean runways
as many critics argued, Pham brings attention to the design’s
seventeenth-
century history left out of the appropriation discourse, which
did nothing
to undermine the implicit high/low cultural bifurcation that
posited that
the style was born in slums and elevated by innovative Eu ro
pean designers,
“obscure[ing] the actual diversity and complexity of the
cultural object being
copied.”17 Inappropriate critique might instead consider how
statelessness
and fashion industry wealth might intersect at vari ous points of
production,
allowing us to ask diff er ent questions about who benefits and
how. 18
Works by historian Ivor Miller and per for mance anthropologist
Dorinne
Kondo also offer up new frameworks for consideration. Miller
considers the
participation of white elite Cuban prac ti tion ers of African-
centered Palo
Monte, expounding on the language of ritual to capture cultural
identities
through initiation, producing what he calls a “spiritual

ethnicity” or ritual
kinships in a tradition that requires years of study within a
community to
master an understanding.19 Kondo centers cross- racial
theatrical per for-
mances by Anna Deavere Smith and Culture Clash that
interrogate the
limits of racial discourses of multiculturalism and critiques of
“identity poli-
tics.” Kondo argues that “unfaithful” impersonations in each
artists’ works—
the purposeful gaps between performers and the “other” that
they portray—
“disrupts audience complacency” by drawing attention to the
performative
aspects of identity and de- essentializing them.20
Though only Johnson and Pham explic itly unpack
“appropriation,” to-
gether these scholars’ examinations open up alternative
discourses worth
exploring. In Kondo’s examples, cross- racial per for mances
employ racial signi-
fiers in order to destabilize them, disrupting familiar racial
scripts or ste reo-
types by demanding audiences experience the seemingly
familiar differently.
Breaking has its own moments of shaking up audience
expectations, lending
itself to potentially more nuanced discussions of appropriation,
which I dis-
cuss further below. The language of initiation allows Miller to
consider how
deep, long- term study of communal practices offer ways to read
Dark Marc’s
cultural adoption in earnest and studied terms. By drawing

attention to
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inappropriate questions, Pham implores us to reframe
appropriation debates
so as to not reaffirm power structures of “white Western
domination . . . over
every one else.” This might, for example, allow us to shift our
perspective from
whether Dark Marc appropriates hip hop to hip hop’s seduction
of him, call-
ing to question the capacity for commercial hip- hop industries
to supplant
embodied hip- hop identities (and thus Africanist aesthetics)
with consumer
identities. Johnson’s analy sis makes room for these very
engagements, ones
that acknowledge the profound impact of per for mance and the
creation of
new subjectivities as a result.
These strategies produce their own kind of dance, where
counter dis-
courses move with, alongside, and yet away from appropriation.
Per for mance
and dance are power ful starting points to ask diff er ent kinds
of questions

and perhaps represent diff er ent kinds of relationships within
cross- cultural
per for mances and in relation to appropriation. For example,
learning how
to break necessarily involves some degree of biting: stealing or
mimicking
someone else’s style as if one’s own. Biting alone is not okay;
by definition it
is appropriation. Yet beginning breakers typically put someone
else’s move-
ment onto their bodies as part of their learning pro cess. Insofar
as biting is
a form of learning, it is also a kind of enactment whose
antithesis speaks to
how one participates. Hence the cry among breakers: “ Don’t
bite!” To not
bite—to abstain from the mere consumption of another’s style—
means that
one must respectfully name one’s direct and indirect teachers,
those who
helped to make one’s movements pos si ble. As well, hip hop’s
Africanist cul-
tural logic also necessitates that one must add their own flavor
to the style
adopted, making for an original style. It is a prob lem if one
fails on either
or both fronts. So appropriation is mitigated by cultural
imperatives that
recontextualize it as learning and even innovation, all while
upholding hip
hop’s history and foundation.
Read symbolically, biting is a couple’s dance in a rhythmic
negotiation.
One partner is pre sent, moving in and through an invisible
partner’s path.

And while one can attempt to embody the style of another—
making the in-
visible pre sent in the dancing itself— the gap between that re-
performance
and the original is always evident because the originality that
birthed that
style (necessarily within a par tic u lar historical context) is
inappropriable. It
is precisely in efforts to not bite and add one’s own style that
shifts away from
discourses of “theft” and erasure to an act that conjures up and
makes ever
pre sent one who is not physically there. It becomes an act of
communion
and community building, adding new dimensions of style into
the dance’s
expanding repertoire overall.
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Breaking also has its own ways of disrupting audience
complacency. For
instance, there are moments in breaking when uprocking
battles occur.
Unlike traditional rocking battles structured in two facing
lines, uprock
face- offs in breaking happen in large groups enmeshed in
cyphers. They are

structured by contrapuntal exchanges while moving circularly
around one’s
opponent, filling the surrounding space with a pantomimed
story of domi-
nating, outwitting, and out- dancing the other without ever
really touching.
When I first witnessed this moment at a breaking battle, I
became immedi-
ately alert, somewhat confused, and thoroughly sucked into the
drama. At
the same time, the “go down” part that Dark Marc mentioned—
when it is
not done to a count but in the context of an individual dancer’s
story— the
“go down” part turns the seeming chaos into rhythmic waves of
up and down
movement that happen at differential moments yet remain
collectively in
sync, perhaps enabled by a polyrhythmic enactment of the
music through
dance. The result is si mul ta neously funny, disjointed, ordered,
and frenzied.
Grasping the whole is impossible and watching is a potentially
disorienting
act. With that said, to be in sync rhythmically is community in
action, which
is evident in Gena Caponi’s discussion of polyrhythms in the
introduction
to Signifyin(g ), Sanctifyin’, and Slam Dunking: A Reader in
African American Expres-
sive Culture: “Polyrhythmic and polymetric music creates
interdependence,
because it forces all participants to be aware of each other —of
their place in
the rhythmic field in relation to others and to the whole.”21
Simply put, it is a

communal mode of interaction, and participating in it requires
deep listen-
ing and bodily awareness of the whole. It necessitates
recognizing the central
rhythmic thread within the multiplicity, even when it is not
being played.
Being in sync adds to it rather than disrupts it. As a meta phor,
polyrhythms
might represent varying depths of cultural initiation, giving us
room to talk
about diff er ent frequencies of participation.
Conclusion
Dance gives us insight into diff er ent cultural rhythms.
Someone like Iggy
Azalea can mimic the sound but this sonic costuming does not
mean she
is in sync with hip hop as a culture, despite hitting all of the
beats of main-
stream commercial rap music. Yet for a while she still had the
influence to
distort the notions of cultural responsibility. Dark Marc dances
to a diff er ent
rhythm, one that builds on the foundation of his adopted
culture. This is a
testament to the real ity that how we connect to hip hop
matters. Yet posi-
tionality complicates the matter.
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In “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popu lar Culture?,” cultural
studies
scholar Stuart Hall clarifies why positionality is unstable
ground: “We are al-
ways in negotiation, not with a single set of oppositions that
place us always
in the same relation to others, but with a series of diff er ent
positionalities.
Each has for us its point of profound subjective identification.
And that is
the most difficult thing about this proliferation of the field of
identities and
antagonisms: they are often dislocating in relation to one
another.”22 Since
social identities are multiple, complicated, and always shifting,
a “profound
subjective identification” with hip hop is always alongside other
equally or
more profound identifications with race, nation, sexuality,
gender, and class,
as each continually shift our positionality relative to others.
There is no
stable, static, or singular positionality from which to locate
ourselves that
resolves everyday and individual experiences of potentially
appropriative
acts once and for all. Similarly, appropriation might locate or
signal “fields of
identities and antagonisms” precisely because our relations to
each other via
par tic u lar modes of expressive cultures are too dynamic and
unfixed.

Labeling appropriation on its own does not fix anything (and I
mean “fix”
as both to resolve and to make stable). Per for mances that can
alter our per-
ceptions and foster deep connections to others can shape
discourses that
speak to under examined dimensions of lived experiences.
Regardless, if
cultural exchange (rather than cultural appropriation) truly only
happens
when groups of people are on equal footing—as dance artist
and scholar
Ananya Chatterjee argued in her keynote lecture, “Of Thievings,
Essences,
and Strategies,” presented at the 2016 Congress on Research
and Dance, on
“Beyond Authenticity and Appropriation” — then we have to
consider the
real ity that the terrain of exchange is always shifting and equal
footing might
not be pos si ble or last.23 By moving away from the binary of
“Is it appropria-
tion or not?,” we can consider the polyrhythmic flows of cross -
cultural per-
for mances: What is inappropriate? What disrupts complacent
expectations?
What’s achievable through sustained study of embodied
practices?
It goes without saying that the po liti cal stakes of appropriation
remain
impor tant. So too are approaches to interpreting cross- cultural
per for mances
beyond appropriation. Dance allows us to engage these debates
differently,

just as it allows prac ti tion ers like Dark Marc to move
differently in relation
to and in proximity with others, and to embody an identity that
entails re-
sponsibilities to a larger collective. Next steps then might entail
staying vigi-
lantly attuned to shifting positionalities within larger structures
of power,
which opens up even more ground for expanding the discourse
now couched
(and erased) in appropriation discourses. That alone might not
be every thing,
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but it can potentially move us toward a better understanding of
our relations
to each other.
Notes
1 Even in such extreme cases as Rachel Dolezal, who morphed
her desire to be black
into identifying as a black woman, the degree of attention and
debate that followed
her being “outed” as white further signals how conditioned we
are to accept the
erasure of black people even from our own identities. Nothing

is actually ours.
2 Cooper, “Iggy Azalea’s Post- Racial Mess.” On Twitter in
December 2014, the rapper
Q- Tip from A Tribe Called Quest took Azalea to task for her
lack of awareness of
hip- hop history, leading to lengthy exchanges with her label
boss and fellow rapper
T. I. See Williams, “Q- Tip Offers.”
3 mtv’s Decoded video “7 Myths about Cultural Appropriation
DebunkeD!” and
Teen Vogue’s video “How to Avoid Cultural Appropriation at
Coachella” are just two
examples that reveal countless additions to these debates.
4 Johnson, “B- Boying and Battling.”
5 See Johnson, “Dark Matter.”
6 Cocks, “Chilling Out on Rap Flash.”
7 Bragin, “Global Street Dance.”
8 Hall, “What Is This ‘Black,’ ” 23.
9 Johnson, “Breaking Beyond Appropriation Discourses.”
10 “Collegiate hip- hop choreo” refers to campus- organized
dance teams that perform
choreographed shows on stage, and compete with other college
teams.
11 Ironically, even though Dark Marc appropriates Star Wars in
his name, it is still
racialized because the film captures the dark side in the iconic
sonic force of James
Earl Jones’s voice, and then displaces this black man’s body
with that of an old
white man. Race matters.

12 While it is common for breakers to give themselves comedic
or self- ethnicizing
names (e.g., AsiaOne, Casper), ambiguous cross- racial names
are not common.
13 Personal interview 2006; Schloss “ ‘Like Folk Songs.’ ”
14 Uprocking is a battle streetdance genre from which early
breakers borrowed heavi ly
in their own upright dancing styles. Uprocking has experienced
resurgence in the
b- boying scene in the past de cade. Joseph Schloss discusses
uprocking’s relationship
to b- boying history at length in Foundation.
15 Schloss, Foundation, 230, 213.
16 Pham, “Fashion’s Cultural- Appropriation Debate.”
19 Miller, “The Formation.”
20 Kondo, “(Re)Visions of Race.”
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21 Caponi, “Introduction,” 10.
22 Hall, “What Is This ‘Black,’ ” 28, 30–31.
23 Chatterjea, “Of Thievings, Essences, and Strategies.”

References
Bragin, Naomi. “Global Street Dance and Libidinal Economy.”
Paper and lecture,
sDhs/corD 2015 Dance Studies Conference, Athens, Greece,
June 7, 2015.
Caponi, Gena Dagel. “Introduction: The Case for an African
American Aesthetic.”
In Signifyin(g ), Sanctifyin’, and Slam Dunking: A Reader in
African American Expres-
sive Culture, edited by Gena Dagel Caponi. Amherst: University
of Mas sa chu-
setts Press, 1999.
Chatterjea, Ananya. “Of Thievings, Essences, and Strategies:
Performative Cultures
in 2016.” Keynote address. Congress on Research in Dance
annual confer-
ence. Pomona College, November 2016. https:// www . youtube
. com / watch ? v
= 2TgRvee2gqc.
Cocks, Jay. “Chilling Out on Rap Flash.” Time, March 21,
1983.
Cooper, Brittney. “Iggy Azalea’s Post- Racial Mess: Amer i
ca’s Oldest Race
Tale, Remixed,” Salon, July 16, 2014. http://
www.salon.com/2014/07/15/
iggy_azaleas_post_racial_mess_americas_oldest_race_tale_remi
xed/.
Hall, Stuart. “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popu lar Culture?”
In Black Popu lar
Culture: A Proj ect by Michelle Wallace, edited by Gina Dent.

Seattle, WA: Bay
Press, 1992.
Johnson, Imani Kai. “B- Boying and Battling in a Global
Context: The Discursive
Life of Difference in Hip Hop Dance.” Alif: Journal of
Comparative Poetics 31
(2011): 173–95.
Johnson, Imani Kai. “Breaking Beyond Appropriation
Discourse.” Race and Differ-
ence Colloquium Lecture Series. Emory University, October
2016. https://
www . youtube . com / watch ? v = 8aTze _ N - 06k
Johnson, Imani Kai. “Dark Matter in B- Boying Cyphers: Race
and Global Con-
nection in Hip Hop.” PhD diss., University of Southern
California, 2009.
http://
digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p15799co
ll127/
id/265317/rec/1.
Kondo, Dorinne. “(Re)Visions of Race: Con temporary Race
Theory and the Cul-
tural Politics of Racial Crossover in Documentary Theatre.”
Theatre Journal 52,
no. 1 (March 2000): 87–107.
Miller, Ivor L. 2004. “The Formation of African Identities in
the Amer i cas: Spiri-
tual ‘Ethnicity.’ ” Contours 2, no. 2 (Fall 2000): 193–222.
mtv Decoded. “7 Myths about Cultural Appropriation
DebunkeD!” YouTube,

November 11, 2015. https:// www . youtube . com / watch ? v =
KXejDhRGOuI.
Osumare, Halifu. “Beat Streets in the Global Hood: Connective
Marginalities of
the Hip Hop Globe.” Journal of American and Comparative
Cultures 24, nos. 1–2
(Spring– Summer 2001): 171–81.
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pdf/764638/9781478009009-013.pdf
on 31 March 2021
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TgRvee2gqc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TgRvee2gqc
http://www.salon.com/2014/07/15/iggy_azaleas_post_racial_me
ss_americas_oldest_race_tale_remixed/
http://www.salon.com/2014/07/15/iggy_azaleas_post_racial_me
ss_americas_oldest_race_tale_remixed/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aTze_N-06k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aTze_N-06k
http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collec tion/p15
799coll127/id/265317/rec/1
http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p15
799coll127/id/265317/rec/1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXejDhRGOuI
Pham, Minh-ha T. “Fashion’s Cultural- Appropriation Debate:
Pointless.” The Atlan-
tic, May 15, 2014. http://
www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/05/

cultural- appropriation- in- fashion- stop- talking- about-
it/370826/.
Schloss, Joseph G. Foundation: B- Boys, B- Girls, and Hip Hop
Culture in New York City.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Schloss, Joseph G. “Like Folk Songs Handed Down from
Generation to Generation:
History, Canon, and Community in B- Boy Culture.”
Ethnomusicology 50, no. 3
(Fall 2006): 411–32.
Teen Vogue. “How to Avoid Cultural Appropriation at
Coachella.” YouTube,
April 20, 2017. https:// www . youtube . com / watch ? v =
GwV3LApkKTk.
Williams, Brennan. “Q- Tip Offers Iggy Azalea a Hip Hop
History Lesson, T. I. and
Azealia Banks Respond.” Huffington Post, January 5, 2015.
http:// www.huffing-
tonpost.com/2014/12/22/q- tip- iggy- azalea- hip- hop- history-
lesson- ti- azealia-
banks- _n_6367046.html.
Downloaded from
pdf/764638/9781478009009-013.pdf
on 31 March 2021
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/05/cultu
ral-appropriation-in-fashion-stop-talking-about-it/370826/
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/05/cultu
ral-appropriation-in-fashion-stop-talking-about-it/370826/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwV3LApkKTk
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/22/q-tip-iggy-azalea-
hip-hop-history-lesson-ti-azealia-banks-_n_6367046.html
Lab Assignment 6
More Classes and Objects
Lab Objectives:
overridden and fields are
hidden
-class objects
Introduction
In this lab, you will be creating new classes that are derived
from a class called
BankAccount. A checking account is a bank account and a
savings account is a bank
account as well. This sets up a relationship called inheritance,
where BankAccount is

the superclass and CheckingAccount and SavingsAccount are
subclasses.
This relationship allows CheckingAccount to inherit attributes
from BankAccount
(like owner, balance, and accountNumber, but it can have new
attributes that are
specific to a checking account, like a fee for clearing a check. It
also allows
CheckingAccount to inherit methods from BankAccount, like
deposit, that are
universal for all bank accounts.
You will write a withdraw method in CheckingAccount that
overrides the
withdraw method in BankAccount, in order to do something
slightly different than
the original withdraw method.
You will use an instance variable called accountNumber in
SavingsAccount to
hide the accountNumber variable inherited from BankAccount.
The UML diagram for the inheritance relationship is as follows:
Copyright © 2022, Dallas College.

Copyright © 2022, Dallas College.
Copyright © 2022, Dallas College
Task #1 Extending the BankAccount Class
1. Copy the files AccountDriver.java (Code Listing 10.1) and
BankAccount.java
(Code Listing 10.2) from the Student CD or as directed by your
instructor.
BankAccount.java is complete and will not need to be modified.
2. Create a new class called CheckingAccount that extends
BankAccount.
3. It should contain a static constant FEE that represents the
cost of clearing one
check. Set it equal to 20 cents.
4. Write a constructor that takes a name and an initial amount as
parameters. It
should call the constructor for the superclass. It should
initialize
accountNumber to be the current value in accountNumber
concatenated
with –10 (All checking accounts at this bank are identified by
the extension –10).
There can be only one checking account for each account
number. Remember
since accountNumber is a private member in BankAccount, it
must be
changed through a mutator method.

5. Write a new instance method, withdraw, that overrides the
withdraw method
in the superclass. This method should take the amount to
withdraw, add to it the
fee for check clearing, and call the withdraw method from the
superclass.
Remember that to override the method, it must have the same
method heading.
Notice that the withdraw method from the superclass returns
true or false
depending if it was able to complete the withdrawal or not. The
method that
overrides it must also return the same true or false that was
returned from the
call to the withdraw method from the superclass.
6. Compile and debug this class.
Task #2 Creating a Second Subclass
1. Create a new class called SavingsAccount that extends
BankAccount.
2. It should contain an instance variable called rate that
represents the annual
interest rate. Set it equal to 2.25%.
3. It should also have an instance variable called
savingsNumber, initialized to 0.
In this bank, you have one account number, but can have several
savings accounts
with that same number. Each individual savings account is
identified by the
number following a dash. For example, 100001-0 is the first
savings account you
open, 100001-1 would be another savings account that is still

part of your same
account. This is so that you can keep some funds separate from
the others, like a
Christmas club account.
4. An instance variable called accountNumber, that will hide the
accountNumber from the superclass, should also be in this class.
5. Write a constructor that takes a name and an initial balance
as parameters and
calls the constructor for the superclass. It should initialize
accountNumber to
be the current value in the superclass accountNumber (the
hidden instance
variable) concatenated with a hyphen and then the
savingsNumber.
Copyright © 2022, Dallas College
6. Write a method called postInterest that has no parameters and
returns no value. This
method will calculate one month's worth of interest on the
balance and deposit it into the
account.
7. Write a method that overrides the getAccountNumber method
in the superclass.
8. Write a copy constructor that creates another savings account
for the same person.
It should take the original savings account and an initial balance
as parameters. It should call
the copy constructor of the superclass, and assign the
savingsNumber to be

one more than the savingsNumber of the original savings
account. It should
assign the accountNumber to be the accountNumber of the
superclass
concatenated with the hyphen and the savingsNumber of the
new account.
9. Compile and debug this class.
10. Use the AccountDriver class to test out your classes. If you
named and created your
classes and methods correctly, it should not have any
difficulties. If you have errors, do not
edit the AccountDriver class. You must make your classes work
with this program.
11. Running the program should give the following output:
Checking Account Number 100001-10 belonging to Benjamin
Franklin
Initial balance = $1000.00
After deposit of $500.00, balance = $1500.00
After withdrawal of $1000.00, balance = $499.80
Savings Account Number 100002-0 belonging to William
Shakespeare
Insufficient funds to withdraw $1000.00, balance = $900.00
After first monthly interest has been posted, balance = $901.69

After second monthly interest has been posted, balance =
$903.38
Savings Account Number 100002-1 belonging to William
Shakespeare
Insufficient funds to withdraw $1000.00, balance = $505.00
Checking Account Number 100003-10 belonging to Isaac
Newton
Savings Account Number 100004-0 belonging to Isaac Asimov
After monthly interest has been posted, balance = $1001.88
C ha p t e r 1 8
I m p r o v i s i n g S o c i a l
E x c h a n g e
African American Social Dance

T h o m as F. D e F r a n t z
Broadly defined, social dance operates as an unavoidable and
essential site of iden-
tity formation for individuals and groups; in mythologies of
American youth culture
from the 1950s forward, it stands as a primary site of
improvised selfhood. In African
American communities, the importance of social dance to group
cohesion through
changing historical eras can seldom be overstated. Social dance
allows its practitioners
access to modes of personal expression that provide urgent
clues of physical capacity,
desire, social flexibility, and an ability to innovate. In social
dance, we discover the ever-
expanding range of possibilities that might define individual
presence within a group
dynamic.
This essay explores African American social dance structures of
the twentieth and
twenty- first centuries, where improvisation operates as a
crucial methodology and
ideology. Improvisation provides a methodology for the
construction of social dance
exchange. Improvisation also stands as a foundational ideology
of black social dance
practice. Conceptually, this twinned resource demonstrates an
unimpeachable central-
ity of the physical practice of improvisation: “creating while
doing,” or consistently ask-
ing questions while moving, becomes foundational to the
emergence of a social black
self in communion with others.

A black social self might be one that imagines itself in
communion with other black
selves, even as it distinguishes its capacities along lines of
ability, interest, and desire.
Black exists in relationship to other markers of identity, black
and nonblack, and the
process of relationship determines possibilities of recognition
that undergird its exis-
tence. In other words, black is not a thing, but rather, a gesture,
an action, a sensibil-
ity made manifest. Thus, a black social self is literally a
concept in motion, shifting and
forming according to the terms of encounter that determine
social relations.
The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies,
Volume 1, edited by George E. Lewis, and Benjamin Piekut,
Oxford University Press USA -
OSO, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4
717492.
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Improvising Social Exchange 331
Social dance offers a site where black motion can be generated,
accommodated,
honed, and appreciated; it offers a place of aesthetic possibility
connected to personal
expression. For this chapter, social dance might be dance
created in situations with-
out separation of performer and audience, and without a
predetermined intention of
expression. The sites of this genre include school auditoriums,
church basements, house
parties, nightclubs, and rented ballrooms, and the genre
becomes manifest within event
celebrations such as family reunions, cotillions, weddings,
school dances, and birthday

parties. On these sorts of occasions, and in these sites, social
dance emerges as the con-
secration of an event by the group, as an embodied aesthetic
marking of presence in
time. Non- linear creativity within social dance motion
distinguishes it from goal- ori-
ented athletics or the politically tilted gestures of rallies or sit-
ins (choreographies of
sport or protest). For our purposes, social dance hinges upon the
possibility of expres-
sion and communication as its own goal within a particular time
and place. Social dance
occurs outside of everyday interactions of commerce, meaning
that it cannot be paid
labor, and, significantly, it requires the participation of a larger
group who recognize the
dance event as such. Defined thus, by its own occurrence and
participation, social dance
constitutes ritual practices that characterize individual action
within communal com-
munication and exchange.
Rhetorics of African American
Improvisation
The adage that African American culture “makes something
from nothing” under-
scores emphases on improvisation and composition that
surround black presence in
the New World. Pundits and cultural theorists can easily align
black social dances to
an “American inventiveness” and “do- it- yourself- ness”
foundational to an understand-
ing of an American self. In this narrative line, youthful America
creates itself out of
incessant volition and ambition to achieve. Similarly,

improvisation arrives as ambition
toward achievement; as an ability to move unexpectedly toward
a goal, as well as an abil-
ity to move as the situation demands. The performance of
intentional, directed move-
ment allows for a recognition of the act of black social dance
improvisation, and creative
invention in the moment characterize its possibilities.
Black social dances also align this necessary moving- to-
express with an embod-
ied realization of pleasure. The assumption of a serious pleasure
within the invention
of physical improvisation merits special consideration here.
Black social dances con-
ceive of social, rhythmic motion as pleasurable, and essential,
modes of interaction
and exchange; improvisation intends to allow for playful,
liberatory embodied choice-
making within the context of the group. The pleasures of social
dance relate to its musi-
cality and embedded processes of choice- making within agreed-
upon group structures;
the practice of dancing in this genre demonstrates emotional and
spiritual well- being.
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332 Thomas F. DeFrantz
In a nod to the general tendency to value literature over orature,
some dance scholars
have labored to define improvisation as choreography in black
vernacular (social) danc-
ing. Dance literature, or choreography, might be work that
could be recorded on paper or

via technologies of visual media, while improvisation might be
more akin to structures
of spontaneous oration and rhetoric. In 2001, theorist Jonathan
David Jackson called for
a valorization of sensing, or emotion, in social dance as a “path
of intelligent knowing”
that might resist the violent Platonic/ Cartesian split caused by
writing (Jackson 2001,
43). In black vernacular dance, “improvisation means the
creative structuring, or the
choreographing, of human movement in the moment of ritual
performance,” a structur-
ing that aligns improvisation with intentional composition (44).
This line of argumenta-
tion tends to re- stabilize choreography, or writing, as the ideal
model for dance practice.
But improvisation, especially in black social dance
circumstances, conveys its own plea-
sures and urgencies without necessary recourse to translatable
signs and symbols that
characterize writing. The improvisational practices of these
dances complete themselves
without an insistence on translation into language or visual
mark.
Jackson’s call for “sensing” as a mode of analysis suggests an
intangible analytic for
improvisation, one that stresses the impermanent, time- based
nature of social dance
production. Sensing becomes manifest in waves, like thought
and motion, and resists
a fixing of gesture. Improvisation that proceeds from a reliance
on sensing, then, might
become enlivened by the engagement of unexpected and unusual
motion; by physical
embellishment or unruliness that works to unsettle formalized

repetitions of gesture.
In other words, the dancer’s innovation in response to a
rhythmic/ musical ground pro-
vides essential markers toward the production of emotion that
might be sensed within
the dance. Fulfilling the age- old adage in a different way, the
“something” produced by
the dance builds from the largely invisible “nothing” of physical
perception.
Teleologies of Improvisation
in African American Social Dance
INSIDE the dance, I enjoy the discovery of what we can do
together. With you watching,
a willing witness, confidante, and partner in motion, I feel
supported to break the beat, to
resist the complex, but steady, grounding pulse that already
offers so many ways to imagine
synchronicities of energy. The complex rhythm that forms the
ground for our dance echoes
in my nervous system, pulsing outward from my incessantly
rhythmicized life force, and
confirming the potency of this encounter of music and
movement. My pulse, our pulse,
the musical pulse converge and align, but then separate so that
our dance can emerge in-
between. I grimace at the effort to move outside of these
cadences, I risk movements and
fail along the way, and laugh and smile at any achievement that
you or I share as we dance.
Social dance functions as a barometer of connectivity, or a way
for people to recognize
a social self. The dance produces relationship; and in it, we
struggle to achieve. Moving

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among others, we hope for connection to be born or to be laid
bare as we stomp, shift,
glide, and dip through passages of spontaneous motion. This
connection is not guaran-
teed, and the risk of social dance arrives intertwined with its
improvisational imperative.
We risk failure, or a miscommunication that might alter our
future capacities outside of
the dance. This risk adds to the sense of urgency surrounding its
execution. Social dance
matters, and its improvisations are embedded within the
relationships that it may or may
not inspire.
African American social dance proceeds from the need to
communicate outside of lan-
guage; a passage of dance may be language- like, but it is not at
all literal. Corporeal Orature,
a designator for the process of communicating through choices
of movement, provides
methodology grounded in history for the practice of social
dance. Here, body- talking
establishes intertextual connection among steps and gestures
performed inside the dance,
with referents often drawn from circumstances outside its
execution. A movement may
make reference to someone else’s version of its form, as in a
step done in cousin Jan’s dis-
tinctive slow- motion style; it may reference dances no longer
in wide distribution, as in

the insertion of a 1980s “Roger Rabbit” in the midst of a 2010s
“Wobble”; it may mimeti-
cally suggest direct metaphor, as in bringing hands to the heart
to indicate feelings of affec-
tion, or brushing a hand across a forehead, to indicate exertion
or “sweating” a partner or
situation. These insertions of embodied referents arrive in non-
linear, evocative assembly;
they confirm the expansive possibility of statement enabled by
the dance. Dancers access
these referents in improvised response to the occasion of the
dance. The most success-
ful corporeal orature employs elegant, unexpected assemblage
of metaphor and physical
achievement.
A historical dimension of black social dance, alluded to above,
renders it at once
archival and futuristic. Dancers rediscover pungent pleasure and
expressive capac-
ity in older, discarded movements, made fresh again now with
unanticipated musical
accompaniment. The music of social dance grounds its
improvisational practices and
stimulates movement possibilities with sonic calls that provoke
physical response. A
propulsive backbeat suggests fast footwork from 1930s dances;
a slow, downward- slid-
ing bass line can inspire “lean back” gestures from repertories
of 1960s or 1990s dances.
Improvisation in this realm, then, reaches back in order to cast
forward, confirming
affiliation among movements from a lively past of dancing
while reimagining possi-
bilities of gesture. This reiteration of motion aligns the practice
of social dance with an

Africanist aesthetic imperative that values cycles of repetition
(Snead 1981). Social dance
can fulfill the embodied reclaiming, or remembering, of musical
genres/ rhythmic bases
that define eras and styles of black popular music.
Learning to Social Dance
I WANT to dance with you. I want to move alongside you, and
toward and away from you,
as we navigate the rhythms and sonic structures that surround
us. I want to guess at what
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you might do, and I want to be correct most of the time. I want
to surprise you with my abil-
ity to do something you didn’t know I might. I want to ride the
rhythm a little longer than
we may have done last time, or to work against the beat in a
stutter step and turn toward
the group. I want my dance to confirm me in this moment. To
validate our communion as
people in relationship, in the space of the dance, in the process
of discovery. When we dance
we wonder at what is possible, we appreciate how impulse turns
into gesture and gesture
reveals desire and intellect. Our dance is multidimensional, and
I want it to be good, I want
to be provocative and profound. I never know whether this will
happen, but I do hope for it.
Will you dance with me?
The process of learning to social dance is actually a process of

learning to improvise.
Or, more correctly perhaps, a process of learning to trust one’s
improvisation. Because
social dance has no set outcome, or ironclad form, its practice
may be defined in large
part by the willingness of its participants. The willingness to
engage in social dance is
a willingness to accept risk and an unruly inability to know
what will happen. Social
dance challenges the faculties of physical engagement and
relational correspondence.
To dance well in this idiom is to trust that one’s choices have
value, and that they will
communicate something recognizable and fleetingly noteworthy.
A longstanding Hollywood trope casts awkward young men in
the role of needing to
learn to social dance in order to connect with their object of
desire; in this idiom, social
dance is defined as a rite of passage. Formulaically, this
scenario usually involves a best
friend or mentor leading the protagonist through a montage of
missteps and embar-
rassments before the big dance event/ prom where tensions and
disappointments may
be resolved through the demonstration of dance. In these
scenarios, the main char-
acter exceeds his training in the heat of the performative
moment, and in an impro-
visational flourish, achieves gestures that he didn’t know he
might. Footloose offers
a classic portrayal of this genre. Note that in both the first 1984
iteration and the 2011
remake, the small- city, white dancers engage in white- derived
“rock and roll” dances,
as well as African American- created social dance movements.

The black social dance
movements— steps drawn from 1960s “black power”– era social
dances including “the
football” and “the Four Tops”— allow the main characters of
the films to shine forth in
improvisatory demonstrations of their abilities and
personalities. The black social dance
improvisations confirm the arrival of a recognizable subj ect in
motion, ready to engage
others in a physical, desirous relationship.
To dance well differs little from speaking well: social dance
demonstrates embodied
rhetoric. Improvisational movers can align ideas in coherent
sequence to signal agility,
ability, wit, or sensual pleasure. Elegance of execution and
composition matters here,
and a recognizable “turn of phrase” separates the best social
artists from their compan-
ions. But because dance movement does not carry literal
meaning, witnesses and part-
ners engage the essential act of decoding that confers
communicative value. To reiterate,
social dance arrives as a mode of encounter, realized by two or
more participants.
Some social dancers have little to say, and their dance arrives in
simple, repetitive
motion. These might be the dances that most people
perform: dances that engage lit-
tle improvisation, and make few extra- dance references; dances
that answer a simple

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rhythmic and social need to be in motion with others. These
dances also matter, as sen-
sation and confirmation of possibilities for a group dynamic.
But, as in the Hollywood
prototype, the moments of black social dance that linger longest
in memory tend to
derive from those compressed circumstances that produce an
unanticipated articula-
tion of character or self, even if only in the instant of their
improvised realization. These
might be small acts, but they can surely shift the architecture of
relationship.
Professional Social Dance
THIS is what I already know. If I push back with my weight
through my hips, and grind
my feet into the ground with a heaviness of step, I can amaze
you with the acuteness of an
angle produced by my bent knees and elbows; I can stun you
into silence with the accuracy
and force of my attacking hips in motion, or the smoothness of
my glide across the floor as
I release my weight ever upwards from the ground. I scurry
across the floor, shifting my feet
without seeming effort. I curve my arm up my body, circling my
hips, touching my torso
lightly, gazing inward, pulling my focus inside, and as I close
my eyes, I suppose I do find
something out. I didn’t know about this weight here, or that
possible shift of energy to there.
Did you see me do that? But even in these few seconds of
knowing my motion, and sensing
it differently, I need your witnessing to stabilize my discovery.

Professional social dances offer an illusion of improvisation.
The conceptual contra-
diction between professional and social dance has to do with the
level of improvisation
present in performance. Professional dancers practice and
rehearse consistently alone
or with others, in order to engage an expanded repertory of
movement available for per-
formance. Social dancers, though, practice less consistently, and
discover possibilities
within the realm of social dancing itself. Talented and highly
skilled social dancers move
beyond the category that would seem to define them as they
become the leading partici-
pants of any circumstance of dance. Their leadership typically
indicates two truths: one,
that their practice intends to minimize risk and maximize a
finished quality of execu-
tion; and two, that their performance might be repeated, or
replicated, nearly intact in
other circumstances and on other occasions.
Professional social dance is the dance of television and film, the
dance of the stage,
and the dance of demonstration. In this form of dance, dancers
embellish and exagger-
ate the physical contours, or steps, of the form to affirm the
possibilities of organized
performance. Expert social dancers in any genre inspire and
delight their audiences,
who inevitably enjoy witnessing the supremely confident
execution of movement that
emerges without the hesitations and ruptured mistakes of
everyday improvisation. The
thrill of social dance performed with minimal risk move its
contents toward the space of

the refined, the repeatable, the commodifiable.
When black social dance can be repeated and professionalized,
it loses its ability to
convey the unexpected discovery. Rather, it seeks to amaze by
its spectacular presence.
In this, black social dance has been entirely successful, from its
earlier international
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achievement in the nineteenth- century cakewalk, to the twenty-
first- century inventions
of j- setting and turf dancing distributed by YouTube videos.
The professional social
dancers who practice these forms, and arrive in films made by
Thomas A. Edison or in
HD on internet sites, seldom make a living by dancing. Like
other dance artists, they
encounter a field full of competition and small opportunity
compared to their number.
But for these best of the best, social dancing is more than
avocation, and their pres-
ence in social settings transforms the event from a place of
mutual exploration to a place
of the show. The professional social dancers— those in the
“cat’s corner” at the Savoy
Ballroom in the 1930s, or on the upper level of the Studio 54 in
the 1970s— demonstrate
a soaring potential for social exchange in their embodied
excellence, their practiced
expertise. Surely they also improvise to some degree, but the
terms of improvisation
arrive in studied difference of effect.

For devoted social dancers, competitions allow a high- level
engagement with the
raised stakes of performance necessary for movement invention.
Indeed, African
American dance competitions occupy a valued and essential site
of social perfor-
mance, stretching from dances in seventeenth- century corn-
husking competitions
to twentieth- century Chicago Stepping competitions. In these
events, expert social
dancers try their skills against other, equally committed movers,
to be judged by other
experts and gathered witnesses surrounding the performance.
Here, improvisation
arises as dancers push their movement beyond the routines
they’ve practiced so care-
fully. Improvisation supplies the burnished energy of desire that
marks physical effort as
extraordinary. Collectively, we feel this “push to exceed” and
move beyond the known
gestures, and the improvisatory flourish inevitably wins the
challenge.
Improvising Sexuality and Failure
THE YOUNG man focuses his energy through his pelvis,
through the muscles that bind the
torso and abdomen to the hips and thighs. His face contorts in
the visage of worry. With one
arm held high, he reaches forward with his other arm, hand
opened and tensed at once, as
if to slap something. He plays different rhythms across his
body: hands moving in a slow
patting gesture against the air, while he animates his hips in
staggered but quick jabbing

circles, moving faster and faster as he bends his legs more and
more. The young women who
surround him seem concerned as well; they seem to want to
understand what he means to
express through his dance. They clap for him, and hold the beat
steady so that he can solo in
front of it. Suddenly, the film cuts to another dancer. The short
film clip lasts less than five
seconds, and viewers witnessing the film learn little of its
implications, or what the short
improvisation might mean for the dancer or his witnesses.
Social dance incites considerations of sexuality, and both its
practitioners and
detractors tend to conflate ability in the dance with sexual
availability. This makes
sense, if we consider social dance as a barometer of intimate
responsiveness and abil-
ity to improvise physically; these might be preferred qualities in
intimate encounter.
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But often, detractors construe black social dances— these
dances that consistently
emphasize an agility in all parts of the body with knees bent,
torso engaged, and pelvis
released— as agents of immorality and instigators of lust. The
young man described
above, dancing in the documentary Rize, demonstrates
movements aligned with “the
stripper dance,” a form named for its borrowing from
commodified, and largely impro-
vised, sexually charged performance dance. Social dancers

conceive the stripper dance
as a solo form, practiced in turns amid a witnessing and
supportive group— often at
the center of a dance circle. The stripper dance exists along the
border of social dance
to be explored in encounter with another, and dances of labor,
to be shared with an
entire group.
The dance circle acts as intermediary between an intimate
sociality of two and the
unwieldiness of a dancer viewed by a mass audience. The dance
circle mitigates inter-
pretive distances that arise as social dance broadens its reach,
and provides an “in-
between” space of encounter for prepared dance and
improvisation, personal discovery
and group consensus. The dance circle protects and permits, and
its boundaries reveal
the limitations of palpable discovery in dance motion. Outside
the circle— sitting in the
auditorium watching social dancers onstage, or at home viewing
dancers online— I can
only guess at the value of danced exchange. Without the cues of
context that mark any
successful and evocative communication, my guesses at the
importance of danced inno-
vations before me will largely fail.
The circle of the dance, referenced by Fanon, accommodates the
needs of a commu-
nity to recognize itself in motion. More important, the circle
allows improvisers to find
their own form without reference to the movements of the larger
group. Outside the
circle— when the group is in its larger, improvising whole—

small gestures and discover-
ies rise and fall, emerge and dissipate alongside the rhythmic
pulse of the dance. These
small victories in movement matter, but they remain small and
contained by the near-
privacy of their occurrence. Without the circle, improvising
social dancers often exceed
the emerging trends of the larger group. Within the circle,
physical moments of “flash”
or “shine” reveal an inner emotional life of the dancers. In the
circle, these surprising
movements are encouraged, observed, supported, valued, and
remembered. But what
do they mean? What of the improvised gestures that resist even
the norms of the group
black social dance, the electric slide or cha- cha slide? If these
group dances promote
access to a black social self in communion with others, what
does improvisation outside
of these formal structures do?
Improvisation, then, poses special problems of interpretatio n in
black social dance,
largely constrained by pressures of everyday racism.
Improvising black social danc-
ers, more than others, may be seen to operate as provocateurs,
non- normative danc-
ers whose moves seek to subvert social norms. In many ways,
this capacity stands, as
social dance allows for the performance of outrageous gesture—
sexualized, desirous,
intimidating— within its context of embodied thought. But
black social dance also risks
failure in its improvisations, and that circumstance, where
movements land without
value or impact, continually reminds us all of the fragility of

.
Because it is probably in those missteps that improvisation
reassures us. What we need
to know: the recovery is always possible, that invention
generates heat and confirms capac-
ity, that figuring the thing out together reminds us of a possible
shared knowledge. Our
improvisation enlivens us because it confirms that we are
flexible, willing to not know, but
engaged in the question of what might be.
References
Brewer, Craig, dir. Footloose. Paramount Pictures, 2011.
DeFrantz, Thomas F. “The Black Beat Made Visible: Body
Power in Hip Hop Dance.” In Of the
Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance
Theory, edited by Andre Lepecki,
64–81. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, translated by
Constance Farrington. New York: Grove
Press, 1963.
Jackson, Jonathan David. “Improvisation in African- America
Vernacular Dancing.” Dance
Research Journal 33, no. 2 (2001): 40– 53.
LaChapelle, David, dir. Rize. Lionsgate Films, 2005.
Ross, Herbert, dir. Footloose. Paramount Pictures, 1984.

Snead, James A. “On Repetition in Black Culture,” Black
American Literature Forum 15, no. 4
(1981): 146–154.
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1. The definition of Hip-Hop in this paper is very broad. It is
far too large of a category to discuss in depth within the scope
of this paper. I would recommend that you concentrate on one
form of Hip-Hop: for example, are you talking about
commercial Hip-Hop? if so, what kind? Are you talking about
street dances? Part dances? Or breaking? You may need to do
further research into a specific form.
2. I am confused by your use of the word "ancient" throughout,
which I think is connected with my confusion around your claim
that Hip-Hop began to develop during the time of slavery. It is
true that some of the African American vernacular forms that
later influenced Hip-Hop were practiced on the plantations, but
the form of social dance performed at that time cannot be
termed Hip-Hop.
3. I would recommend that you take another look at Naomi
Bragin's "Shot and Captured," which we read for class. This
piece could be very useful to you as it complicates many of
your claims, especially that HIp-Hop is about happiness and
freedom of expression. It is also very deliberately not a
commercial form in this instance.
4. The writing is strong over all and the paper has a logical
flow, but I would recommend that you work on your paragraph
structure. You want to be sure that each paragraph discusses a
single topic in depth, and doesn't bounce around between tw o or
three sub-points of your argument.
5. You need to examine a performance in order to analyze HOW
Hip-Hop does that things you claim it does. Are there any
particular performances that you can use to exemplify your

claims about the political and social import of Hip-Hop?
Naomi Bragin
TDR: The Drama Review, Volume 58, Number 2, Summer 2014
(T222),
pp. 99-114 (Article)
For additional information about this article
Access provided by University of
California @ Riverside (17 Dec 2014 13:47 GMT)
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tdr/summary/v058/58.2.bragin.html
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tdr/summary/v058/58.2.bragin.html
99
TDR: The Drama Review 58:2 (T222) Summer 2014. ©2014
New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology
Shot and Captured
Turf Dance, YAK Films, and the
Oakland, California, R.I.P. Project
Naomi Bragin
When a group comprised primarily of African-derived “people”
— yes, the scare quotes matter — gather at the
intersection of performance and subjectivity, the result is often
[...] a palpable structure of feeling, a shared

sense that violence and captivity are the grammar and ghosts of
our every gesture.
— Frank B. Wilderson, III (2009:119)
barred gates hem sidewalk
rain splash up on passing cars
unremarkable
two hooded figures stand by
everyday grays wash street corner clean
sweeps a cross signal tag white
R.I.P. Haunt
They haltingly disappear and reappear.1 The camera’s jump cut
pushes them abruptly in and out of place.
Cut. Patrol car marked with Oakland Police insignia
momentarily blocks them from view. One pulls a
1. Turf Feinz dancers appearing in RIP RichD (in order of
solos) are Garion “No Noize” Morgan, Leon “Mann”
Williams, Byron “T7” Sanders, and Darrell “D-Real” Armstead.
Dancers and Turf Feinz appearing in other
N
ao
m
i B
ra
gi

n
100
keffiyah down revealing brown. Skin. Cut. Patrol car turns
corner, leaving two bodies lingering amidst
distended strains of synthesizer chords. Swelling soundtrack.
Close focus in on two street signs marking
crossroads. Pan back down on two bodies. Identified.
MacArthur and 90th. Swollen chords. In time to the
drumbeat’s pickup, one ritually crosses himself. He performs a
classic turfing move — the Busta. Arms
stretch skyward. Hands grip for invisible support. Waking in
mourning. Cut. A car turns the corner as
he steps into the street. Disappears. Cut. Reappears.
Robotically, he directs traffic. Cut.
Frozen in a deep lunge; the car maneuvers around his still silent
body.
Stage: Set. Scene: Shot and Captured.
Black Liveness/Black Performance
The opening shots of the four-minute YouTube film RIP RichD
(2009c) relay a recogniz-
able scene: two young black men biding time on a street corner
are subject to surveillance and
sanctioning. That the film was not storyboarded in advance and
the police just “happened”
to show up, confirms the inevitability of the narrative. Police
presence is the condition under
which the young men’s evidently criminal lingering breaks into
streetside performance. The
removal of gloves, hood, and keffiyah to show brown skin
marks the revelation and identifi-

cation of black bodies under the regulatory sanction of the law
— accentuated by the visual
effect of the police car passing over the performers’ bodies.
Blackness exists in the moment of
monitored movement.
YouTube users can replay the scene in perpetuity (nearly six
million views as of 11 December
2013), demonstrating the performativity of the interface itself.
In the street and online, acts of
repetition rehearse “an invidious ethos of excess” (Martinot and
Sexton 2003:173) that consti-
tutes the paradigm — not in any spectacular act of violence but
rather “in the fact these cops
were there on the street looking for this event in the first place,
as a matter of routine business
[...] a more inarticulable evil of banality” (171).
On the Season Two opening episode of MTV’s World of Jenks,
dancer D-Real recalls how
“we did it in one take,” the police’s parting warning — “y’all
better just be dancin” — setting the
hostile terms under which black males may stand on street
corners (MTV 2013b). The scene
simultaneously frames the demand for black performance in the
existential criminality of black
bodies and situates the hood dance of turfing in the context of
everyday police violence — a trau-
matic reality conditioning life in East Oakland neighborhoods.2
The fact that RIP RichD was
created in the wake of yet another friend’s passing dovetails
with the film’s particularly apt stag-
ing of black performance — a staging that captures the social
life of turfing as an embodied
expression of mourning and death.

RIP videos are Larry Alford, Eric “E-Ninja” Davis, Deondrei
“Pstyles” Donyell, Danny “Bboy Silver” Fiamingo,
Kashif “Bboy Phlauz” Gaines, William Latimore, Davarea
McKinley, Jeremiah “Joyntz” Scott, Rayshawn “Lil
Looney” Thompson, and Denzel “Chonkie” Worthington. YAK
Films is Yoram Savion, Kash Gaines, and
Ben Tarquin.
2. I use the term hood dance to define hip hop dances created in
response to local histories of specific urban neigh-
borhoods. Hood dances circulate through club, theatre, street,
cyberspace, and studio, such that even unexpected
spaces (home, rooftop, bus stop, YouTube) hold potential to
become stages through performance. For instruc-
tional hood dance videos, see host Lenaya “Tweetie” Straker
and producer Sway Calloway’s “Dances From Tha
Hood” at MTV.com (MTV 2008).
Figure 1. (previous page) Capturing the scene of routine police
violence. Garion “No Noize” Morgan and
Leon “Mann” Williams (behind car) remove their hoods under
the terms of the cops’ warning, “Y’all better
just be dancin.” “TURF FEINZ RIP RichD Dancing in the
Rain.” YAK Films, Oakland, CA, 2009.
(Screen grab courtesy of YAK Films)
rebeccachaleff
Highlight
Shot and C
aptured
101

Sasha Torres has noted television studies scholar Jane Feuer’s
description of an “ideology of
liveness” that promotes “the false promise of television’s
immediate access to and transmission
of the real” (Torres 1998:7). Considering televisual control over
“authentic” representations of
black life, Torres extends the ideology of liveness to encompass
what José Esteban Muñoz calls
the “burden of liveness,” a demand that the minoritized subject
“be only in ‘the live’ mean[ing]
that one is denied history and futurity” (1999:189). Challenging
celebratory imputations of per-
formance’s radical potential, Muñoz argues that liveness is
“encouraged [...] especially when
human and civil rights disintegrate” (187). Torres adds that
televisual liveness is most evidently
revealed “as one of the chief mechanisms in the reproduction of
racial hegemony,” in that its
“depictions of ‘live’ blacks tend to proliferate just as dead black
bodies are piling up” (2003:49).
I would argue that in the case of blackness, the demand to
perform not only “substitute[s] for
historical and political representation” (Muñoz 1999:188) but
moreover is a scheme for onto-
logically positioning blackness-as-liveness. Experiencing black
performance is the same as
gaining “immediate access to [...] the real.” What remains
overlooked is how, within a world
predicated on serving and protecting non-blackness, blackness
is absolute negation.
With regard to the screening of RIP RichD, the demand for
blackness-as-liveness ensures
that conditions of black life are radically misread, securing the
ontological disappearance of
the black. When hood dance is screened on popular social

networking sites like Facebook and
YouTube, it encounters an antiblack discourse extended through
its global proliferation and
reception. Through the recognition of blackness as captured
life, RIP RichD, the hood dance
practice of turfing, and the collaborating artists solicit empathy
for and politicized awareness
of black life and lives lived. Circulating in an antiblack world,
the RIP dances gain visibility and
value on the global stage, ensured (and insured) by the turf
dancers’ embodiment of captivity
and death.
Student Essay Contest Co-Winner
Naomi Bragin is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at UC
Berkeley. She works at
the intersection of dance, performance studies, critical black
theory, and ethnography,
drawing from her background as a street dancer, educator,
activist, and Founding Artistic
Director of Oakland-based DREAM Dance Company. Her
dissertation, “The Black Power
of Hip-Hop Dance: On Kinesthetic Politics,” is an ethno-history
of hip hop’s California
foundations during the 1960s and 1970s, and a critique of the
politics and ethics of
participating in street dance culture in a contemporary context
that denies freedom to
black people. [email protected]
The PhD program in Performance Studies at the University of
California, Berkeley,
provides an interdisciplinary and individually crafted
curriculum directed at advanced
studies in the literatures, performances, cultural contexts, and
theories of performance

throughout the world. Based in the Department of Theater,
Dance, and Performance
Studies, the program affords access to a rich range of faculty
drawn from across the arts,
humanities, and social sciences. It at once takes advantage of
Berkeley’s distinguished
history in the field of drama and theatre studies, and opens out
to a wider interrogation of
the disciplines and methodologies of performance studies.
Students in the PhD program
conduct research in a diverse array of interdisciplinary
methodologies and topics, and
have the opportunity to engage in performance activities that
complement dissertation
research. The PhD program is designed as a six-year program
(12 semesters). It offers
core courses, but no predetermined areas of emphasis. Each
student determines an
individual research agenda within the broader field of
performance studies, using faculty
resources to develop both a clear field specialization and a
sense of interdisciplinary
innovation.
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3. Judges on MTV’s America’s Best Dance Crew consistently
demand dancers be “clean,” a management strategy that
assimilates hip hop movement into a choreocentric commercial
frame, policing total uniformity of timing and
Hood Dance and Choreocentricity
Hood dances are an element of black street dance, which I
define to encompass a transnational
range of formal techniques, based in improvisation and driven
by African-derived grammars
that retain in their practices and politics a strong alliance with a
discourse of the street, main-
taining critically unstable relationships to formal, and often
elite, institutions of artistic pro-
duction. As importantly, black street dance is a conceptual
framework for studying dance as a
sensory-kinesthetic modality through which the logic of racial
blackness — and the imagination
of a form of black power — remains operative, even, and
perhaps more significantly, when for-

gotten, ignored, or denied.
Based in black improvisational practices that teach hip hop
aesthetics, hood dances are acts
that locate movement style in the social life of black
neighborhoods. In the process of its collec-
tive formation and ongoing innovation, hood dancing supports
an intramural dialogue among
black participants located in different times and places. This
kinesthetic process follows Thomas
DeFrantz’s definition of corporeal orature, “align[ing]
movement with speech [...] to incite
action,” communicating meaning both within and beyond the
immediate performance context
(2004:67).
As a mode of black thought and sociality, hood dance resists the
terms of choreocentricity — a
racialized logic that sustains a Eurocentric discourse of
choreography as the standard by which
to evaluate peoples and cultures that are non-Western, not
completely Western, or antagonis-
tic to Western modes of thinking and being. I distinguish the
logic of choreocentricity from
the concept of choreography encompassed by black social
dancing, as Jonathan David Jackson
argues: “[I]n African-American vernacular dancing in its
original sociocultural contexts, where
there is no division between improvisation and composition [...]
improvisation means the cre-
ative structuring, or the choreographing, of human movement in
the moment of ritual perfor-
mance” (2001:44). Likewise, Anthea Kraut historicizes the
concept of choreography/er, revealing
its discursive functions in European classical dance and
critiquing its relevance to black vernac-

ular forms. The choreographer’s elevated (in fact mythic and
transcendental) status creates “a
division between choreography and improvisation, with the
former perceived as premeditated
and intentional and the latter seen as impromptu and haphazard”
(2008:56). The choreography-
improvisation binary continues to enable stereotypes of
“instinctive black performativity” (57).
Choreocentric logic frames hood dance as choreography’s
ontological opposite: nontechni-
cal, spontaneous, disorganized, intuitive, raw, in crisis —
concepts bound up in notions of black-
ness and black performance. Blackness-as-liveness functions
within the choreocentric operation
to frame hood dance as the im/mediate(d), “putatively ‘natural’
expressive behavior of black per-
formers” (Kraut 2008:57), over and against the arbitration of
artists trained in white Western
author-choreography. Whiteness does not necessarily map onto
white bodies but indexes a con-
ceptual fusion: abstraction, development, structure, coherence,
stability, maturity.
In addition, a critique of choreocentricity considers the
limitations of scholars’ discursive
resources and the ways Western intellectualism produces the
conditions of possibility by which
black social life remains largely incomprehensible and
ignorable, as the two factors are co-
constitutive. Within dance studies, the priority of a theoretics of
choreography cannot be disso-
ciated from a historical privileging of single author,
proscenium, concert stage works that follow
elite and avantgarde Eurocentric tradition. Within mass culture
as well, choreography tends to

be the primary way people view, interpret, and evaluate dance,
most evident in the judging spec-
tacle of popular dance reality shows that promote formulaic
creative practices antagonistic to
the black improvisation principles that vitalize hip hop dance.3
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103
movement. The judging operation effectively cleanses hip hop
of its funky blackness — funk being hip hop’s musi-
cal predecessor and standing for everything whiteness does not
— the smelly, unclean, super-bad. The recent genre
hip hop choreo has evolved in step, marginalizing black
improvisation principles of multifocal orientation, rhyth-
mic complexity, dynamic subtlety, and collective innovation.
4. While Henry Jenkins has coined the term transmedia to
describe fictional narratives that develop across media
platforms (2006:96), I use the term to consider dance as a
kinetic mode of storytelling that, in the particular
instance of the RIP films, bridges embodied and virtual
mediums of expression.
5. In the early 2000s, dancer Jeriel Bey created the acronym
TURF (Taking Up Room on the Floor) to counter neg-
ative assumptions about the style (Bey 2013). After moving to
Oakland from Los Angeles, Bey increased media
and civic recognition of turfing as a city sport, organizing local

CH.12 BLACK CULTURE WITHOUT BLACK PEOPLE HIP-HOP DANCE

CH.12 BLACK CULTURE WITHOUT BLACK PEOPLE HIP-HOP DANCE

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