Introduction
Hip Hop Dances, New Terrains, Interdisciplinary Approaches
14:15 – 35 min.
by Friederike “Frieda” Frost
Inaugural Conference
Spectres of Movement: Tracing Corporeal Knowledge in Hip Hop Dance Studies
14:50 – 60 min.
by Mary Fogarty et Imani Kai Johnson
In the hieroglyphic visual abstraction of a breaker that appears on the cover of the anthology, The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Dance Studies (2022, ed. by Fogarty & Johnson), graffiti writer and sculptor Mare139 evokes a sense of revelation and unknowability, gesturing toward the hidden forces that shape embodied expression. In this keynote address, Fogarty and Johnson explore how hip hop dance carry forms of knowledge—corporeal, ancestral, and affective—that fall outside of conventional academic frameworks. Drawing on contributions from the Handbook, our ethnographic work, and reflections on the state of the field, we examine how these ways of knowing challenge dominant modes of analysis and shed light on the cultural, institutional, and global dynamics that inform hip-hop’s movement vocabularies and epistemologies. We consider how these spectral elements not only complicate scholarly engagement with hip hop dances but also enrich our understanding of its global trajectories and cultural resonances.
Hip Hop’s Pluriversal Epistemology Across the Elements: Collective, Polycultural, and Embodied Knowledges in the Cipher Ritual
16:05 – 35 min.
by Griffith Rollefson
This talk begins with an introduction to hip hop culture, its traditional “four elements”—deejaying, breaking, graffiti writing, and emceeing—and its umbrella “fifth element”: knowledge. I offer this overview through a brief world tour of cultural artefacts and knowledge formations from my ERC project, CIPHER: Hip Hop Interpellation. This study proposed that by examining the glocalization of hip hop ideas across the four elements, we could better understand how culture works (Rollefson, et. al. 2023). By looking at the trope of “battling” in hip hop, for example, we gain insight into issues of translation, tradition, media, and beyond; what resonates locally and how cultural contours adapt and integrate new knowledges (Rollefson 2018). That said, it didn’t occur to me until recently that hip hop’s Afrocentric episteme that drew a continuity between the West African griot—poet, musician, storyteller, knowledge bearer, healer—and the emcee was premised not just on rhymed couplets and street reportage, but on the ritual and “ceremonial” role of the MC (Master of Ceremony). The talk thus concludes with an investigation into how this epiphany relates across hip hop’s ritual ciphering practices that create open, “pluriversal” spaces for collective, polycultural, and embodied knowledges across the elements (Mbembe 2015).
G.I’s Dancers! The Circulation of House Dance Knowledge via American Military Bases in Germany
16:40 – 35 min.
by Larissa Clément Belhacel
The story of house dance tends to insit on the role of individual figures who travelled between the United States and Japan or Europe. This narrative relegates the story of those who stayed in the United States to the background. It also skips over the material conditions through which exchanges took place, in an informal and porous way. African American soldiers played a role in the transmission of these dances. Stationed in Japan, in the Pacific, or in Europe, most notably in Germany, they recreated American ways of life and fully took part in the popular musical cultures of their time. Building on extended interviews with former G.I.’s who practiced house dance and who lived in the Frankfurt region, the monographic approach centered on four dancers with different artistic, professional, and geographic trajectories, opens different ways of dancing house.
Film
17:15 – 35 min.
Around the pavement
by Gabriel Naghmouchi
The film explores the memory of hip hop and jazz rock dances in France through the stories of key figures in emblematic sites. It retraces the trajectories of these artists while probing the transformation—even the disappearance—of sites and spaces that supported the culture. It takes on the pau city of visual archival material and proposes an approach attuned to collective memory. The screening will be followed by a discussion with the director. The discussion will especially focus on reconstitution and mise-en-scène as key tools for navigating holes in the archive and sparking the emergence of living memory.
Sound Archives
18:00 – 35 min.
Listening to Babson
by Laura Steil
In the social media era, the social and cultural life of hip hop dancers increasingly takes place online. The dancer-choreographer and co-director of the CCNRB [National Center of Choreography of Rennes and Brittany], Ousmane “Babson” (1975-2020) was a pionier in the art of online communication. As early as 2007, he took up the “Justice” role on Dailymotion, commenting on the happenings of the hip hop scene with caustic humor. More recently, and up to the time of his passing, he hosted live streams on Facebook, inviting key hip hop dancers to share their stories as a way of opening pathways towards intergenerational cultural transmission, but also the digital archiving of oral history. He meant to fight against the historical erasure of lived experiences of hip hop culture. Listening to Babson, a sound collage edited by Laura Steil, presents an opportunity to appreciate Babson’s perspectives on the construction of memory and the centrality of experience as well as the importance of community.
Panel discussion
Hip Hop Archives: Incorporating, Storing, Documenting
18:40 – 75 min.
by Véronique Ginouvès avec Ucka Ludovic Ilolo, Timothée « B-Boy Knowledge » Bidal, Sonia Dollinger-Désert and Fantine Collonge
Memories, traces, legacies… From Side Step an exhibition at Maison Folie Wazemmes focusing on the northern French history of hip hop dance, to the major collections project “Hip hop Archives: Step Into Lyon’s History,” which highlights the ways in which hip hop has shaped the cultural, social, and political life of Lyon, this roundtable proposes a reflection on concrete initiatives involving the use of private, association-based, and institutional archives related to hip hop dance. What relational, cultural, heritage-related, and memorial stakes are raised by these projects of collecting, archiving, and exhibiting hip hop dance, and more broadly, dances of African descent? How can archived artifacts, traces, and memories be (re)lived, (re)invigorated, and experienced anew?