The organization navigates the cutting edge of progressive hip-hop, using dance as a common language by which values of unity and inclusion go hand in hand with resilience and struggle. Though there is a long history of cultural appropriation of African American dance forms—dating back to the Lindy Hop and Charleston 100 years ago—hip-hop can also be a vehicle for promoting education, history and multicultural solidarity.
Executive Director Porshia Derival has spent more than a decade training in the dance’s foundational elements: party dance, popping, locking, boogaloo, rocking and breaking. She describes the culture “as a series of messages all brought down from when it first started in the late 60s, early 70s, up until 2021 today.” Embedded in hip-hop’s DNA, she says, is the concept of “what it meant to really cultivate freedom, not only in our communities, but for every single person of color worldwide.”
Though hip-hop’s pioneers were Black and Latino, the culture’s Asian influences extend back to the era of seedy 42nd Street grindhouses in the 1970s, when martial arts films played alongside blaxploitation movies, and Bruce Lee became an American culture hero. Lee’s flying kicks were emulated by hip-hop dancers in the 1980s, and in the 1990s the kung-fu aesthetic was famously adapted by a Staten Island rap crew who named themselves the Wu-Tang Clan. In 2020, the Wu’s founder RZA made the song “Be Like Water,” which draws inspiration from Lee’s philosophy of Jeet Kune Do, whose essence is fluidity and adaptability.
These values are also present in hip-hop dance.
Buddha Stretch, a pioneering freestyle hip-hop dancer and educator who cut his teeth in New York’s Mop Top crew during the mid-1980s and would eventually move on to become a founding member of the Elite Force crew, notes that hip-hop culture has always had social relevance to a diverse audience. He points to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s iconic 1982 song “The Message” as an example. The song, he says, isn’t “just talking about Black people, it’s talking about what’s happening in our community. Hip-hop is still doing that. Hip-hop is still conscious.”
At the core of this message, he adds, is “the hope of Black and Latino and all people of color to overcome the adversity that we’ve been put through, through music and culture.”
“Having those messages being passed through movement, through soul, through the sway of the hips, through the rock of the torso, it’s really beautiful to witness how hip-hop dance really encompasses our entire history as a people,” Derival says.
Thomas sports a T-shirt that speaks directly to the historic struggle for Black artists. It reads, “They want our rhythm, but not our blues.”
But Chow’s story illustrates how the narrative can be changed, from cultural appropriation to cultural appreciation.”My hope and also what I work towards every day is that there is a level of respect for the roots of the culture,” Chow says. “Everything that now many people all around the world can access and experience and feel is off the backs of very, very important, amazing pioneers.” The creators of the art form, like Phase 2, Crazy Legs, Buddha Stretch and Safi Thomas, should be household names, she says. “I hope their names will be etched into history, that they will be regarded as heroes and the base from which everybody else can build from.” – Text by Eric Arnold