The Underground Dance Movement essays

The Underground Dance Movement essays In almost every culture throughout history, there has been dance. Prayer dances, celebratory dances, social dances. In many cases, we can see the cultural progression through the progression of dance. In the United States alone, weve seen the transitions from the European-grown ballet to tap, then to modern dance. What is not so well catalogued, however, is the underground progressive dance movement. Starting in the late sixties, the so-called Underground or counter-culture has built its own species of dance. Our subject today is the three most dominant styles of this new wave, popping, or the Electric Boogie, hip hop/break dancing, also known as old school dance, and the trance/house or new school dance. The television show Soul Train was really one of the keys to the spread of these radical new styles. It was especially instrumental in spreading the Electric Boogaloo, or Boogie. The Electric Boogie developed in the mid-sixties by a family of black men living in Fresno, California, through influences like James Brown and strangely enough, TV shows like Lost In Space. It was a mutant child of sorts, of what is called The Robot dance, Popping, and Miming. The Robot is a dance that our generation has grown up recognizing, the angled body parts, sliding feet, and rigid motions all creating the illusion of a human robot. Popping, however is an unfamiliar term to many of you. Popping can be described as energy passed through the body, popping and snapping elbows, wrists, necks, hips and just about all the body joints along the way. The final ingredient to the mix, however, to control and smooth out the stop-and-go of a popping robot, was the influence of mime. The miming is what gives the Electric Boogie its voice, by making it possible to tell stories and create illusions with the body. This new dance was the forerunner to break dancing, and indeed ma ny of the so-called ...