An evening of improvisation between hip hop practitioners and contemporary dance artists who embody multiple forms, identities, and engage multiple performance contexts. Inspired by France’s “I Love This Dance” street dance battle event, each artist selected a piece of music/sound they wanted to improvise to and were paired with another artist. They each danced to each other’s selections without knowing what they are. The audience witnessed multiple interpretations of sound and real time creative process.

A facilitated dialogue followed the performance.

Featured participants:

• Aisha Bardge
• Ardyn Flynt
• G’bari Gilliam
• Max Pham
• Amaria Stern
• Stephan Tanner

About The Hybrid Lab: The dance world is becoming increasingly hybrid in terms of how dancers identify and how dance practices are shared cross culturally. In mainstream culture, hip hop dance is often seen as pure entertainment, but hip hop is a culture that is not monolithic. Experimental and hybrid practices of hip hop dance forms  have been happening in both the underground dance clubs and performance contexts for decades. This platform initiates a deeper understanding of the cultural values of black social dance practices in the contemporary performance context as a counter narrative to tokenization.

Amy O’Neal has been merging hip hop and contemporary dance within the contemporary performance context since 2000 to challenge notions of race, gender, and the sampling nature of creativity. As a white woman, she is a guest practitioner of black social dance culture in the cypher, in battles, and as an event organizer. She teaches hip hop party dances, house dance, freestyle techniques/mindset, contemporary dance, composition, and lectures on black social dance historical context and culture at USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance.

amyoneal.com