Creating an IMDB for Street Dancers

The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) had its early origins in 1989 via a Usenet news group. In the 21 years that have passed, it's become the go-to database for movie information among film professionals and laymen. Want to find the latest info on your favorite celebrity? Look her up on IMDB.com. There's a huge amount of data on IMDB that creates a sprawling portrait of film, television, independent shorts, and video games on a global scale. It's a fascinating sociological study. So why can't dancers have something like IMDD, albeit at a smaller scale, to reflect our history and contributions to the world?

Lack of organization and lack of documentation are just two of the biggest reasons why there's never been a comprehensive database for dancers worldwide. We know the level of unprofessionalism within the street dance culture in Los Angeles. So in the past thirty to forty years of our underground scene, we haven't been documented successfully in any organized way online. There's no data to pull together because no one is gathering it. It's floating out there in the ether. That's a tragedy.

We could learn so much more if there was an organized effort to track street dancers' artistic and professional contributions. We'd see a history of the theatrical shows as well as performances on camera for film and TV shows. We could learn more about a dancer's career. We could identify hot spots around the world where dancers are getting hired for work. A more detailed picture of our lives and community could emerge with an IMDB-like database.

It would also help get our names out there. It can be a self-promotional tool, which many independent filmmakers know after using IMDB to create their own profiles. In an age where there's too much information online, we need ways to organize and highlight the main points. Otherwise, we get lost in the crowd. Perhaps a database for dancers could be initiated if we started to track information from professional dancers affiliated with agencies. Or if we assigned documentarian roles to folks in different dance scenes and asked them to chronicle the lives of their dancers.

Opening up a database would require reaching a critical mass of users which could then create a movement for street dancers to document themselves out of their own volition. Doing this would mark a change of attitude in the way we do things. Not only would we see more data being compiled, we'd be taking responsibility for our careers and preserving it for future generations.