Hip-hop dance is a family of street styles that grew with funk and hip-hop music: locking and popping on the West Coast in the 1970s, breaking in the Bronx, and later ‘new style’ and party dances. It is built on freestyle, cyphers (circles) and battles.
Hip-hop culture began in the Bronx around 1973 among African American and Latino youth: DJs such as Kool Herc extended the drum ‘breaks’ of funk records, and dancers filled them. On the West Coast, Don Campbell created locking in Los Angeles (and his group The Lockers appeared on Soul Train), while Boogaloo Sam and the Electric Boogaloos developed popping in Fresno and Long Beach. Each city added its own style — Oakland turf dancing, Chicago footwork, Memphis jookin, Los Angeles krump — and each style has founders and vocabulary worth learning. Hip-hop dance values originality: you learn the foundations, then you find your own flavour.
