page_title: Hip-hop dance
section_title: Commercial/New Style
hierarchical_section_title: Hip-hop dance / Dance industry / Commercial/New Style
caption_attribution_description: Hip-hop dancer Spc. Joseph Coine of Fort Campbell, Ky., exhibits great flexiblity while dancing to Mishon's "Distant Love" during live auditions for the 2011 U.S. Army Soldier Show at Wallace Theater on Fort Belvoir, Va. U.S. Army photo by Tim Hipps, FMWRC Public Affairs
context_page_description: Hip-hop dance refers to street dance styles primarily performed to hip-hop music or that have evolved as part of hip-hop culture. It includes a wide range of styles primarily breaking which was created in the 1970s and made popular by dance crews in the United States. The television show Soul Train and the 1980s films Breakin', Beat Street, and Wild Style showcased these crews and dance styles in their early stages; therefore, giving hip-hop mainstream exposure. The dance industry responded with a commercial, studio-based version of hip-hop—sometimes called "new style"—and a hip-hop influenced style of jazz dance called "jazz-funk". Classically trained dancers developed these studio styles in order to create choreography from the hip-hop dances that were performed on the street. Because of this development, hip-hop dance is practiced in both dance studios and outdoor spaces.
  The commercialization of hip-hop dance continued into the 1990s and 2000s with the production of several television shows and movies such as The Grind, Planet B-Boy, Rize, StreetDance 3D, America's Best Dance Crew, Saigon Electric, the Step Up film series, and The LXD, a web series.
context_section_description: The dance industry responded to hip-hop dance by creating a commercial version of it. This urban choreography or studio hip-hop, sometimes called "new style", is the kind of hip-hop dance seen in rap, R&B, and pop music videos and concerts. From the point of view of someone deeply immersed in hip-hop culture, anything that looks like hip-hop dance that did not come from the streets and is not improvisational in nature is not a true hip-hop dance form. In an interview with Dance magazine, choreographer and hip-hop dance teacher Emilio "Buddha Stretch" Austin, Jr. described his point-of-view:
  There are a lot of jazz dancers out there doing pseudo hip hop. A lot of teachers don't know the history, they're just teaching the steps. They're learning from videos, but they don't know the culture. If all you see is Britney Spears, you think that's hip hop, but that's never been hip hop. It's completely watered down. And studios could [sic] care less, because hip hop is one of their biggest moneymakers.
  Stage performance can suppress improvisation which defined hip-hop dance early in its development. Furthermore, meshing different dance styles together dissolves their structures and identities. In an interview with The Bronx Journal, choreographer and artistic director Safi Thomas expressed a similar qualm as Austin concerning hip-hop instruction within the studio:
  In a lot of studios what you find is people just doing movement to hip-hop music. So if there's hip-hop music in the background, and they're moving, they're calling it a hip-hop class. The problem with that is let's say I wanted to teach a ballet class and I just come in, and I throw on Mozart, and I just start moving—and I'm not doing any of the foundational elements. I am not doing any of the movement vocabulary of ballet. I can not call that a ballet class and that's what happens in relation to hip-hop... within the studio realm there is no standard for the art form, and [the teachers] don't know what the foundational elements of the art are. They know nothing about popping, nothing about locking, nothing about boogaloo, breaking, or the hip-hop dance—the social dances—or any of that. They know none of the history which spans over 30–35 years, and so they pretty much cut off any type of edification that a dancer can have.
  The term "new style" was created by dancers outside the United States. According to Moncell Durden, adjunct professor at Drexel University and director of the film History and Concept of Hip-Hop Dance, the 1992 dance documentary Wreckin' Shop From Brooklyn was very influential to hip-hop dancers in France and Japan. These dancers wanted to move like the New York hip-hop dancers who were profiled in the documentary. They called the social dancing (party dancing) they saw "new style" which was short for "New York Style".
  In the context of the commercial dance industry, hip hop (or new style hip-hop for dancers in France and Japan) is choreographed urban party dancing with studio technique added to it. From a technical aspect, it is characterized as hard-hitting involving flexibility and isolations—moving a specific body part independently from others.
   A significant juncture in the development of hip-hop was the addition of eight-counts, a method of counting dance steps to stay in sync with the music. Toni Basil introduced this studio technique into locking in the 1970s. Basil was trained in ballet before being introduced to street dance by Don Campbell, the creator of locking and founding member of The Lockers dance crew. She is responsible for teaching the rest of The Lockers how to dance to counts. Traditionally hip-hop dance, or any form of street dance, is not performed to counts as these styles were created on the street rather than in a studio setting. Therefore, the introduction of counts was a pivotal move into bringing hip-hop dance from the street into the studio. Even with this addition, it would be years before commercial hip-hop developed into its current form.
  A second important event in the development of hip-hop was the start of hip-h
caption: Hip-hop dancer Joseph Coine performing in 2011 in Wallace Theater at Fort Belvoir, Virginia.
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