The Challenge to Create Organized Change in Street Dance Culture

We've touched on various reasons why there is disorganization and lack of growth in today's street dance culture. There are several causes of why the scene remains an underground culture that is misunderstood and misinterpreted by an uninformed mainstream audience. For folks who are trying to make a difference in today's dance community, one of the biggest challenges is managing people in a self-sustaining, creative collaborative community. It's not easy mobilizing a group of people and motivating them towards a goal.

The nature of our community has favored talented individuals. But global change comes from individuals working together as teams. And teams require charismatic leaders to foster a vision and manage their team members in clever ways. We don't have enough of these charismatic leaders in today's street dance culture. We have well-meaning event promoters and business-minded ones who want to make lots of money. But few people are inspired to want to help volunteer at an event. It becomes a chore. It's just too much of a hassle to be involved with supporting a jam especially when the schedule runs late, there's lack of central leadership, and there's no clear communication channels.

How do we bring better management to our street dance events? This may be a generalization but we don't see effective management strategies used in producing these events possibly because few of the promoters and event leaders are drawing from the needed experience. It has become almost a joke that street dance events run late and are unorganized and chaotic. So it's not a surprise that outside collaborators don't want to work with us. We've struggled to bring in investors and sponsors because we haven't proven that we can handle a profitable venture.

Maybe the street dance scene needs a re-education for its event promoters in people management. We don't necessarily need more money. We need to learn how to communicate more effectively with our willing volunteers and to bring the best out of them. Can we inspire them to look past our financial limitations and dream up creative cost-effective solutions? If we can inspire a culture of creative collaboration, then we're taking the first steps towards building a strong dance scene. Our best resources are always our people.