It must be a strange time for an OG street dancer to witness what’s happening in today’s street dance world. Bboyin’, poppin’, and lockin’ have exploded around the globe. There seems to be no limitations to how far street dance culture can reach. The public is more aware of our world, but at the same time, there seems to be more confusion about history, technique, and the current state of affairs in local communities. This week, we’re tackling a few issues that have popped up on our dance landscape. Today, it’s all about the communication of history.
Documenting and transcribing historical events is always a complicated endeavor. We know this from our days in our nation’s education system. History is the recollection of those who write it. The only way that we can get a more balanced view is to cross-reference and corroborate one version of the story with other accounts. In the street dance world, there is plenty of heated debate on the true creators of a style, the evolution of a dance, and the contributions of individuals along the way. There has been little official documentation of our world. Most of it is passed on via oral tradition, passed on from mentor to student or within tight-knit communities.
Now, information can be produced and then instantly disseminated worldwide via the Internet. Misinformation spreads like wildfire. And minds become warped by a twisted version of the truth. In this Youtube age, the person who can produce the most videos with the most views can get a point across to a large audience. This becomes a dangerous phenomenon when this source has an ulterior motive like damaging other individuals, twisting the truth to inflate one's reputation, or to launch a war of words against competitors. Lazy minds will not cross-reference this source and accept it on face value.
If we don’t remedy this, then further division will occur in our communities. This is most apparent in the poppin’ community. There are so many different camps within poppin’ that it’s starting to get confusing. What makes this even more difficult is that few of these camps ever interact or relate to each other in person. Whether through pride or fear of losing one’s reputation; visible, loud voices in the poppin’ community choose to speak out but never listen to the other party.
We need a different model. And it has to be based in deeper relationships and organic community. The hip hop choreo scene has handled this a lot better than our poppin’ brethren. In the fifteen to twenty years that the choreo scene has sprung up in SoCal, there has been more agreed upon history through the consistent sharing and interaction among different teams and leaders. Much of this is due to the team nature of the choreo scene, while there are a lot of individual players in the poppin’ world. We all know that miscommunication is dissipated when we converse, debate, and interact in person. So let’s get off the keyboard and bring our conversations face-to-face.
For the poppin’ world, we need a balanced approach to seeking, studying, and documenting the dance’s history for a public to appreciate. Education is our best weapon against hatred bred from miscommunication within our culture. It’s not just about passing on information to a younger generation. A striving for education allows these younger dancers to critically think for themselves and to evaluate the history that precedes them. They need this in order to grow to become the best dancers they were meant to be. That is the greatest gift an older generation can give them in this age of potential misinformation.
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