Editorial: Changing How Street Dancers Are Visually Influenced

One of the natural aspects of a street dancer’s journey is striving to be like your role model. There are master dancers whom we love. We glowingly appreciate their technique, concepts, and approach. And we search for ways to be exposed to their work. In the 1980s, the street dance generation were influenced by those who were closest to them. As the 1990s and early 2000s progressed, dancers treasured rare VHS tapes and personally-shot miniDV footage of their role models as sources of inspiration. Nowadays, we’re flooded by video recordings on Youtube and Facebook that filter into our collective imagination. Has this killed individual creativity? It could be argued that today’s upcoming generation of new street dancers are too identical to their idols because they’re inundated with so much video noise. Is there a way that we can restructure the online video landscape to creatively challenge our youngest generation? (Photo above is from a Google Images Search for Pandora Radio.)

In the past thirty years, compared to the rest of the world, the U.S. has some of the most individually, well-rounded dancers in the street scene. Now, the rest of the world has caught up and we’re no longer the most technically skilled rhythm nation. There’s only so much time during the day. So if young dancers are consuming thousands of online videos, they may have less time to practice and to naturally experience creative discoveries during their dancing. A parallel argument has been made regarding the hours of television watched by children and the effect on their creative lives. Too much time watching online videos has led to a suffocated creative life.

How do we address this? The most drastic solution is to just go cold turkey and cut off your video-watching intake. But for most of us this is unlikely to happen. Perhaps we need a technological solution, like a video player or filter that is open-sourced and can be programmed to play videos of different styles and approaches to our dance. Think of it as a “smart filter” that has the ability to sort through thousands of videos and to provide us with a more well-rounded diet of street dance styles. This would especially be helpful for popping where there are many stylistic approaches that remain hidden to the viewing public. You’ll only learn certain styles like boppin’ and Fillmore if you learn in person from the masters. To everyone else, these styles may not exist on their radar.

Perhaps this “smart filter” could also evolve like a playlist on Pandora. We’d have to work out an algorithm to help mold the playlist of videos that a user chooses based on keywords or tags. Regardless, this technological approach shouldn’t replace the hard work required to train and grow as a dancer. It’s only a visual aid to broadening our tastes and creative awareness, as one who attends a liberal arts college might experience. A broader awareness only leads to a stronger sense of creative thinking that allows a street dancer to grow more effectively in this media-heavy online world.