Aspect of the history of dance
The history of hip-hop dances encompasses the people and events since the late 1960s that have contributed to the development of early hip-hop dance styles, such as uprock, breaking, locking, roboting, boogaloo, and popping. African Americans created uprock and breaking in New York City. African Americans in California created locking, roboting, boogaloo, and popping—collectively referred to as the "funk styles". All of these dance styles are different stylistically. They share common ground in their street origins and in their improvisational nature of hip hop.
More than 50 years old, hip-hop dance became widely known after the first professional street-based dance crews formed in the 1970s in the United States. The most influential groups were Rock Steady Crew, The Lockers, and The Electric Boogaloos who are responsible for the spread of breaking, locking, and popping respectively. The Brooklyn-based dance style uprock influenced breaking early in its development. Boogaloo gained more exposure because it is the namesake of the Electric Boogaloos crew. Uprock, roboting, and boogaloo are respected dance styles but none of them are as mainstream or popular as breaking, locking, and popping.
Parallel with the evolution of hip-hop music, hip-hop social dancing emerged from breaking and the funk styles into different forms. Dances from the 1980s such as the Running Man, the Worm, and the Cabbage Patch entered the mainstream and became fad dances. After the millennium, newer social dances such as the Cha Cha Slide and the Dougie also caught on and became very popular.
Hip-hop dance is not a studio-derived style. Street dancers developed it in urban neighborhoods without a formal process. All of the early substyles and social dances were brought about through a combination of events including inspiration from James Brown, DJ Kool Herc's invention of the break beat, the formation of dance crews, and Don Cornelius' creation of the television show "Soul Train".
Beginning of breaking.
According to hip-hop activist Afrika Bambaataa and b-boy Richard "Crazy Legs" Colón, the purest hip-hop dance style, breaking (commonly called "breakdancing"), began in the early 1970s as elaborations on how James Brown danced to his song "Get on the Good Foot". People mimicked these moves in their living rooms, in hallways, and at parties. It was at these parties that breaking flourished and developed with the help of a young Clive Campbell. Campbell, better known as DJ Kool Herc, was a Jamaican-born DJ who frequently spun records at neighborhood teenage parties in the Bronx. Jeff Chang, in his book "Can't Stop Won't Stop" (2005), describes DJ Kool Herc's eureka moment in this way:
Herc carefully studied the dancers. "I was smoking cigarettes and I was waiting for the records to finish. And I noticed people was waiting for certain parts of the record," he says. It was an insight as profound as Ruddy Redwood's dub discovery. The moment when the dancers really got wild was in a song's short instrumental break, when the band would drop out and the rhythm section would get elemental. Forget melody, chorus, songs—it was all about the groove, building it, keeping it going. Like a string theorist, Herc zeroed in on the fundamental vibrating loop at the heart of the record, the break.
In response to this revelation, Herc developed the Merry-Go-Round technique to extend the breaks—the percussion interludes or instrumental solos within a longer work of music. When he played a break on one turntable, he repeated the same break on the second turntable as soon as the first was finished. He then looped these records one after the other in order to extend the break as long as he wanted: "And once they heard that, that was it, wasn't no turning back," Herc told Chang. "They always wanted to hear breaks after breaks after breaks after breaks." It was during these times that the dancers, later known as break-boys or b-boys, would perform what is known as breaking.
 Breaking started out strictly as toprock, footwork-oriented dance moves performed while standing up. Toprock usually serves as the opening to a breaker's performance before transitioning into other dance moves performed on the floor. A separate dance style that influenced toprock is uprock, also called rocking or Brooklyn uprock, because it comes from Brooklyn, New York. The uprock dance style has its roots in gangs. Although it looks similar to toprock, uprock is danced with a partner and is more aggressive, involving fancy footwork, shuffles, hitting motions, and movements that mimic fighting. When there was an issue over turf, the two warlords of the feuding gangs would uprock, and whoever won this preliminary dance battle decided where the real fight would be. Because uprock's purpose was to moderate gang violence, it never crossed over into mainstream breaking as seen today, except for some specific moves adopted by breakers who use it as a variation for their toprock.
Aside from James Brown and uprock, hip-hop historian Jorge "Popmaster Fabel" Pabon writes that toprock was also influenced by "tap dance, Lindy hop, salsa, Afro-Cuban, and various African and Native American dances." From toprock, breaking progressed to being more floor-oriented, involving freezes, downrock, head spins, and windmills. These additions occurred due to influences from 1970s martial arts films, influences from gymnastics, and the formation of dance crews—teams of street dancers who get together to develop new moves, create dance routines, and battle other crews. One b-boy move taken from gymnastics is called the "flare", which was made famous by gymnast Kurt Thomas and is called the "Thomas flair" in gymnastics.
B-boys Jamie "Jimmy D" White and Santiago "Jo Jo" Torres founded Rock Steady Crew (RSC) in 1977 in the Bronx. Along with Dynamic Rockers and Afrika Bambaataa's Mighty Zulu Kings, they are one of the oldest continually active breaking crews. For others to get into the crew, they had to battle one of the Rock Steady b-boys—that was their audition, so to speak. The crew flourished once it came under the leadership of b-boy Richard "Crazy Legs" Colón. Crazy Legs opened a Manhattan chapter of the crew and made his friends and fellow b-boys Wayne "Frosty Freeze" Frost and Kenneth "Ken Swift" Gabbert co-vice presidents. RSC was instrumental in the spread of breaking's popularity beyond New York City. They appeared in "Wild Style" and "Beat Street"—1980s films about hip-hop culture—as well as in the movie "Flashdance". They also performed at the Ritz, at the Kennedy Center, and on the Jerry Lewis Telethon. In 1981, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts hosted a breaking battle between Dynamic Rockers and Rock Steady Crew. "The Daily News" and "National Geographic" covered this event. In 1982, their manager Ruza "Kool Lady" Blue organized the "New York City Rap Tour", which featured Rock Steady Crew, Afrika Bambaataa, Cold Crush Brothers, the Double Dutch Girls, and Fab 5 Freddy. This tour traveled to England and France, which spread hip-hop culture to those countries. In 1983, they performed for Queen Elizabeth II at the Royal Variety Performance. The following year, they recorded a song titled "(Hey You) The Rock Steady Crew", which was commercially released. RSC now has satellite crews based in Japan, the United Kingdom, and Italy.
Capoeira debate.
Capoeira is an Afro-Brazilian martial art, described by Pabon as "a form of self defense disguised as a dance." Its influence on breaking is disputed and debated; one side believes that breaking came from capoeira, while the other side denies this. Capoeira is hundreds of years older than breaking, and uprock is similar in purpose to capoeira in that both translate aggressive combat movements into stylized dance. Both breaking and capoeira are performed to music and, since both art forms are acrobatic, some moves look similar to each other. However, capoeira is more rule-oriented. One rule in capoeira is that a capoeirista's back can never touch the ground. In contrast, a breaker's back is almost always on the ground, and the only rule in breaking is that you do not touch your opponent during a battle.
Jelon Vieira and Loremil Machado brought capoeira to the United States in 1975. Throughout this decade Vieira taught capoeira workshops in New York City and started a capoeira performance company called Dance Brazil that toured across the United States. In Gerard Taylor's "Capoeira: The Jogo de Angola from Luanda to Cyberspace" (2005), master capoeira teacher Mestre Acordeon is quoted as saying: "Demonstrations by Mestre Jelon [Vieira] and Loremil Machado are considered by many to be responsible for the incorporation of capoeira movements into breakdancing." Former "Village Voice" reporter Sally Banes and her colleague, photographer Martha Cooper, witnessed breaking in 1980 while covering Henry Chalfant's photography exhibit of subway graffiti. She wrote of the dance: "Its spatial level called to mind capoeira, the spectacular Brazilian dance cum martial art form that incorporates kartwheels, kicks, and feints low to the ground, but the two were dissimilar enough in shape and timing that capoeira seemed at most only a distant relative, and certainly one the breakdancers weren't acquainted with—at least on a conscious level." In his book "Hip Hop Had a Dream" (2008), Damien Morgan states: "Breakdancing can have its origins in capoeira, because it does not focus on injuring the opponent; it rather emphasizes skill towards your opponent, to express yourself away from violence... in most cases, it is blatantly obvious to see some of Breakdancing's foundations in Capoeira."
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"We didn't know what the f-ck no capoeira was, man. We were in the ghetto! There were no dance schools, nothing. If there was a dance it was tap and jazz and ballet. I only saw one dance in my life in the ghetto during that time, and it was on Van Nest Avenue in the Bronx and it was a ballet school. Our immediate influence in b-boying was James Brown, point blank."
Richard "Crazy Legs" Colón;Rock Steady Crew
Several breaking practitioners and pioneers tend to side with the camp that does not believe breaking came from capoeira. B-boy Crazy Legs states: "We didn't know what the f-ck no capoeira was, man. We were in the ghetto!" According to Pabon, "Unlike the popularity of the martial arts films, capoeira was not seen in the Bronx jams until the 1990s. Top rockin' seems to have developed gradually and unintentionally, leaving space for growth and new additions, until it evolved into a codified form." B-boy crew Spartanic Rockers adds: "Despite of [sic] many rumours and opinions Breaking didn't originate from Capoeira but during the last few years many moves, steps and freezes of this Brazilian (fight-) dance have inspired more and more B-Girls and B-Boys who integrated them into their dance." B-boy Ken Swift was breaking long before he saw capoeira: "In '78 I started [breaking] and I didn't see it [capoeira] til '92 ... I was around, too—I was in Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens, I went around and I didn't see it. What we saw was Kung Fu—we saw Kung Fu from the 42nd Street theaters. So those were our inspirations... when we did the Kung Fu sh-t we switched it up and we put this B-boy flavor into it..."
Funk styles.
While breaking was developing in New York City, New York, other styles of dance were developing in California. Unlike breaking, the funk styles—which originated in California—were not originally hip-hop dance styles: they were danced to funk music rather than hip-hop music, and they were not associated with the other cultural pillars of hip-hop (DJing, graffiti writing, and MCing). The funk styles are actually slightly older than breaking due to fact that boogaloo and locking were developed in the late 1960s.
Locking and roboting.
Like breaking, the different moves within the funk styles occurred due to the formation of crews. Don "Campbellock" Campbell created locking, and in 1973 founded The Lockers (originally called The Cambellock Dancers) in Los Angeles. Locking is characterized by consistently freezing or "locking" in place while dancing. Campbell developed locking accidentally while pausing in between dance moves when trying to remember how to do the Funky Chicken. He developed routines based on his new style using these pauses or "locks." Chang lists some of the other dance moves performed in locking, including "...points, skeeters, scooby doos, stop 'n go, which-away, and the fancies."
The Lockers made several appearances on "Soul Train"—the song-and-dance television program featuring funk music, soul music, disco, R&amp;B, and social dancing. They also appeared on "The Carol Burnett Show", "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny