Innovations: Emotional Storytelling Through Street Dance

The more street dance styles grow up, the more we find ourselves wanting to tell stories that resonate deeply with emotions and life experience. It’s only a natural process. Conveying emotions is not new to our culture or to dance in general, but the movement towards telling a narrative with emotions is only starting to be explored. Madd Chadd has been interviewed in Dance Spirit magazine on how his work with the LXD has opened him up to a new area in his dance. The Groovaloos have hit on many life experiences told through their nationally touring show Groovaloo. And the bboys of Expression in South Korea have inspired a new generation of breakers through their Marionette show.

For most new school street dancers, it’s hard enough just learning foundation and getting the technique down. Our current social climate is dominated by training for battles and contests with the occasional showcase. So telling a story hasn’t been a priority. But we need to tell stories. If we are to create opportunities for ourselves to get paid and to offer an entertainment product that other people will buy, we as dancers have to become storytellers. The world wants to hear stories because experiencing a narrative is part of our inherent search for meaning.

As street dancers and hip hop choreo heads infiltrate the entertainment industry more and more, we’re discovering that we need to command more of our careers through creating a unique product that causes others to knock on our doors. Not the other way around. Can dancers be seen on the same level as actors in an Academy Award winning film? Why not? These are different artforms but it’s possible that one day we’ll see a dancer’s performance powerfully move an audience through a narrative.

The challenge we’ll have to overcome is to introduce and establish a vocabulary for our dance that an uninformed audience can understand. Actors have dialogue to inform their performance. Without dialogue, dancers rely on their visual physicality. As filmmakers and dancers unite, perhaps we’ll see this new language develop.