History of dance Essay

Extra credits assignment: Dance2Live Crew VS. Crew on Feb. 15th, 2014 It was the first time to watch a live dance battle in the United States. Each crew’s performance impressed me and even shocked me a lot because of their insistence toward dancing and contribution to the crew. Before watching this dance competition, I have watched similar dance battles in movies, which solely give me a sense of aggressiveness or radicalism. However, this dance competition totally alters my previous impression. Every crewmember showcases their love to hip-hop dance. They really enjoy what they are doing. One thing surprised me is that many participants are kids, who are just four or five years old. Although they are very young, they treat the competition seriously and practice over and over again in order to perform optimally. Numerous floor moves look really hard and are easy to get hurt, but those young participants are not afraid of and worried about doing those difficult floor moves. Instead, they try their best to dance precisely even though they are not as fast and expert as some older participants. One four-year-old crewmember called Jim is one of the youngest participants in this competition. Before the competition began, I noticed that he stayed at the corner of the room and practiced his dance movements without having a rest. Though afterward he did not obtain a chance to dance during the battle, he still kept dancing and doing floor moves himself during each intermission. At that moment, I felt that Jim was truly keen on hip-hop dance. He just dances for himself instead of merely showing off the difficult floor moves. On the other hand, I can feel that all crews are not only for the final prize. Rather, they are enjoyable to hip-hop dance. During each dance battle, every crewmember has few minutes to do some freestyle dance moves under DJ’s remixed music. As one of the audience, I did not feel how fierce of each battle. Every dancer always interacted with the audience and treated it as a performance rather than a competition. Some participant dancers missed the rhythm or made mistakes, but they were not flustered or gave up, especially the teen participants. They all performed confidently and proudly. No matter whether they were good at doing difficult floor moves, they enjoyed the stage and danced as best as they can. From my personal perspective, it was an awesome performance. I can feel each dancer’s enthusiasm and love about hip-hop. Personally, people love hip-hop dance because it gives everyone freedom to express themselves no matter where they are from or how old they are, just like Buddha Stretch and Rennie Harris. These two excellent hip-hop dancers’ freestyle dance and persistent promotion of hip-hop culture help young people and teenagers, who probably are suffered from the poverty and discrimination, build up self-confidence and self-esteem. During the process of dancing hip-hop and learning hip-hop, people can demonstrate their personality and even attitude to life. Just like I have watched during this dance competition, hip-hop dance connects people of different ages and different races together. Sometimes they danced similar moves, but they showed in their unique style. Some participants were better at floor moves than others, but they were all highly engaged in the performance and in expressing themselves, which were more important than winning the competition. Basically, this dance competition makes me more passionate about hip-hop dance than before. Not only the dance movements are cool and fun to learn, but also the culture and spirit of hip-hop are needed to understand and acquire.