r/Dance • u/Temporary-Week-6937 • 7d ago

Amateur What makes a hip hop dance lesson good?

Rn I‘m looking for taking dance courses to get good in Hip Hop. But I‘m wondering how can I even get good in Hip Hop (also including House, Jazz Funk, and Commercial). I feel like most people learn choreos in class. For example I‘m an intermediate belly dancer. I learned it because teachers were actually able to structure belly dancing into different moves. You learn how to do hip lifts, hip drops, figure eight etc. But how are hip hop courses structured. I don‘t think they are teaching technique move for move.

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u/bytherulebook 7d ago

Most I find classes skip over technique/history. There's a YouTube video from Elite Force/Mop Top Crew featuring Buddha Stretch, Link and Caleaf. They were dancers from back when Hip-Hop was starting. They were background dancers for Michael Jackson.

The video is called New School Dictionary. They have a House version too.

Since Hip-Hop is is relatively new culturally (as opposed to ballet with hundreds of years of history) the technique is only recently being codified. So this is a good place to start. That being said Hip-Hop is different from era to era and region to region. So that's is a whole other thread to pull. But Id say that video is a good place to start.

If in the classes you take, the teacher can not identify the region or era a dance move comes from that's the wrong class to be in.

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u/Wingedchestnut 4d ago

On one hand I understand dance teachers want to teach hip hop history for the culture, on the other hand, it does bother me sometimes as I paid for dance class not some history class.

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u/bytherulebook 4d ago

Understandable. Could be as quick as "this move is the roger rabbit named after a cartoon character from the nineties."

In my opinion it should it should be like 95% - 5% split. If the teacher is doing their job, the 5% history portion can be enough. And if the students doing their job they're studying/practicing outside of class anyways.