The best way to help your dancer improve at hip hop is to practice at home! Games that develop personal style are a fun way to work on individual movement quality, and exercises that focus on the basics of hip hop will help with consistency.
Helping your child improve at a skill you may not be familiar with can feel like a daunting task. I know I would be lost if I was asked to help anyone improve in, say, chess! But when it comes to assisting your dancing son or daughter with their hip hop dance skills, there are plenty of easy and fun ways to level up their abilities from home!
If you’ve got a kid who is cooler than you’ve ever been, hip hop class might be right up their alley! Good hip hop classes stay on the pulse of what’s popular in current hip hop culture, while paying homage to the founders and movements that created the styles that make up contemporary hip hop.
Tired of hearing the same old, tired Kidz Bop songs on repeat when your child wants to practice their hip hop skills? As a dance teacher and judge, believe me, so am I! Finding clean, appropriate, and FUN music for hip hop is harder than it should be, but lucky for you, I’ve done the work already!
Waacking is a style associated with street and hip hop dance that is characterized by intricate fast arm movements and vogues or freezes. Much of the movement originates in the shoulders and some moves look similar to a person dancing with invisible nun chucks.
Voguing is a style of dance, fashion, and subculture that originated in Harlem, New York, developing between 1960-1980, evolving from drag competitions and pageantry balls within the Affrican-American and Latinx LGBTQ communities.
Tutting is one of the funk styles/street dance styles affiliated with Hip Hop, and is considered by most to be an off-shoot of Popping, at least originally.
Popping is considered to be one of the original Hip Hop dance styles and has come to describe a variety of movement types. Underneath the giant umbrella term that is Popping, there are many different sub-styles and off-shoots, and what is considered definitively to be popping is still being debated.
Locking emerged from the West Coast in the 1970s, and was created by Don Campbell. This style of dance is usually performed to funk music, and the movement is characterized by locks, wrist rolls, Uncle Sam points, high fives, the hambone, The Scooby Doo, Scooby Walk, Scoobot, and sudden stops inside fluid grooves.
Krump is a style of street dance affiliated with Hip Hop that began in Los Angeles in the early 2000s, and is known for it’s intense rawness and controlled power, giving it an aggressive and almost combative appearance.