My Miseducation of Hip Hop
As a performance artist, I tend to enjoy tormenting myself with immense performance challenges: teaching myself to sing backwards, reciting Morse Code whilst performing vigorous dance choreography, becoming “possessed” by a spirit live on stage, or chop off all my hair so I can repeatedly switch back-and-forth between male & female identities. But, I think my most challenging art skill was teaching myself how to dance Hip Hop.
I grew up in the hard streets of Carpentersville, Illinois, a place actually now known for its racial tension. And while my peers in art school were struggling with their cultural identity, I was struggling to even have a culture to struggle against. I was perhaps partially investigating whether one could adopt another culture and be seamlessly successful. So successful that it was shocking.
I was warned by my mentor that I would:
“Offend all black people.”
While my initial investigation was to shock people with my fantastic Hip Hop dance skills, I was too embarrassed to go to a dance studio and learn from a true professional. I’m a DIY type of woman so I spent over a month in the studio by myself rehearsing choreography samples from YouTube videos posted by Luam, Brian Puspos, Kazuki and Sohey, Dan-D, and two ghetto fabulous teens in a high school lunch room before I even bothered to show another human my dancing skills.
I ached in places I never thought existed. All these low-to-the-ground movements did not even belong in my vocabulary. My pelvis cried for mercy.
I grew a pair and showed some outside eyes my attempt at learning Hip Hop.
Apparently, my interpretation of Hip Hop looks like a Whirling Durvish Zen Cheerleader – not a white chick with soul. No game. No swagger. Not even offensive. Just BAD Hip Hop dancing.
I was partially heartbroken, but I ran with it. My mission then became to learn the choreography with the heart of a Black person… with White person abilities.
After committing the sampled dance material to memory, I found that it was worlds away from Hip Hop. In fact, when the piece was finished, I was adamant on mentioning that the choreography was derived from my failure at Hip Hop and it became the least interesting thing the folks in my critique wanted to talk about. They commented on how the movements appeared universal, even pedestrian.
I realized that movement exists within us, as a people, and while it can be learned, we can’t become all that there is behind this movement. Movement is culture. Roots. Soul. While trying to lose myself, I was hoping to gain someone else’s experience through repeating the choreographer’s interpretation on moving. But, while trying to become them, I became a more self-actualized me.
I appreciated my failure at an attempt to become something I wasn’t.
