African American Dances by City

IllmaticDelta

IllmaticDelta

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Blues Dance (Mississippi-Louisiana)

Blues dancing is a family of historical dances that developed alongside and were danced to blues music, or the contemporary dances that are danced in that aesthetic. Amateur Dancer carried an article entitled "Blues and Rhythm and Blues Dancing" in a July/August 1991 issue.[1]

Mura Dehn used the term "The Blues" in The Spirit Moves, Part 1, as the sub-section title of Chapter II, referencing different dance styles.[2]

African-American essayist and novelist Albert Murray used the term "blues-idiom dance" and "blues-idiom dance movement" in his book Stomping the Blues
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Slow Drag

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In The Land Where the Blues Began, musicologist and producer Alan Lomax described a party in the Delta countryside late one sultry summer night. The party was in a little wooden shack and “from it came a deep, powerful rhythm, as if someone were beating a huge drum yonder in the moonlit cotton patch.”

Once inside, Lomax realized the rhythm was coming from the shuffling feet of dancing couples glued together belly to belly, thigh to thigh, their arms wrapped tightly around each other’s necks. They were grinding their hips together slowly as they dragged their feet along the floor, doing a dance called the slow drag. The slow drag was also called “the blues.” There were other juke-joint dances like struttin’ (a more upbeat slow drag), the snake hips, the shimmy, and the funky butt, but after midnight it was all about the slow drag.

“Slowly, with bent knees and with the whole shoe soles flat to the floor, they dragged their feet along its surface, emphasizing the off beat, so that the whole house vibrated like a drum,” Lomax wrote. The dancers were moving to the music of a man playing guitar and singing the blues. At his side was a young boy dragging the head of a broom over the rough wooden floorboards in time to the bluesman’s beat.

The slow drag is the earliest known blues partner dance, dating from the early 1900s. Dragging the feet along the floor was a response to the prohibition Sanctified preachers laid down against dancing outside church walls.
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Overlap with “Grind”
In addition to the naming overlap with “grind” and “slow grind,” another interesting observation comes when Frankie Manning is describing grinding. During the same interview referenced previously, he says, about grind, “You know what’s so funny, I remember when I was a… youngster…I was at least 15 years old… I remember we used to, when the music started playing slow, first I remember you’d be dancing with the young lady and you’d be trying to get close to her, you know…and she would bend over you, you know. So we were bending back as she was bending over you. And I remember gradually, the dance started straightening up and you was almost bending over her.” You can actually see the first part of this type of interaction happen in St. Louis Blues with Bessie and Jimmy as well, which I find really interesting.

Even when “grind” or “slow grind” isn’t offered as an alternate name, the descriptions sometimes contain the word “grind,” “grinds,” or “grinding.”

Vibe
A lot of the examples—particularly in party or juke joint settings—depict this as a couples’ dance, romantic or sexual in nature. Both contexts of slow drag in St. Louis Blues are certainly of that nature as well. Anecdotally, I’ve also heard some elders describe slow drag as romantic or sexual couple dancing, grinding, even a type of foreplay. Now, how we apply this when we’re in a different dance context (if we’re dancing with people with whom we don’t intend to be sexually or romantically entangled) is a separate issue. But these examples show that multiple people who danced slow drag did so with sexual or romantic overtones. This is a statement of ‘was/is,’ not a statement of ‘should.’
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some other moves/characteristics

The Ballroom as named by Mura Dehn in her documentary (today referred to as Ballrooming) was a slow dance done by Lindy Hoppers at the Savoy Ballroom to Blues music. It satisfied a Harlem need for a slower, fluid, but highly rhythmic dance with expressive body movements which could not be facilitated by the upright stance of European ballroom dances.

The Fish Tail is a movement in which the buttocks form a variety of figure eights by weaving out, back, and up. Although the Fish Tail came from Africa, it was considered obscene when dancing in the European fashion with one arm around a partner's waist. The African dance disdains bodily contact.[24]

The Funky Butt, Squat, Fish Tail, and Mooche are all performed with hip movements. Similar dances were popular in New York City by 1913. When dancers at the Jungles Casino-"officially a dancing school" "got tired of two-steps and schottiches...they'd yell: 'let's go back home!'...'Let's do a set'...or 'Now put us in the alley!' I did my Mule Walk or 'Gut Stomp' for these country dances.", according to pianist James P. Johnson.[25] "The dancers were from the Deep South."[6]

Funky Butt - "Well, you know the women sometimes pulled up their dresses to show their pretty petticoats-fine linen with crocheted edges-and that's what happened in the Funky Butt.... When (Big)Sue arrived at my father's tonk, people would yell...'Do the Funky Butt, Baby!' As soon as she got high and happy, that's what she'd do, pulling up her skirts and grinding her rear end like an alligator crawling up a bank."[6]

The Slow Drag in its various forms was first documented during, and danced to the music of, the ragtime era.

Snake Hips is a movement in which the knees are moved forward and back, first one knee then the other, while keeping the feet together. As in Ball the Jack, in which the knees are held together, this results in a rotation of the hips.[26]

The Strut is similar to, or even "virtually indistinguishable" from dances seen in South Africa, Ghana, and Nigeria.[27] Strutting was often associated with cakewalking. "You had a lot of strut in the Cakewalk-lots of fellows walked like that just for notoriety-and they could really show off." "George "Bon Bon" Walker was the greatest of the strutters, and the way he promenaded and pranced was something to see," and was "the man who turned the Strut into the Cakewalk."[28]

Blues dances as a genre have been said to share a certain aesthetic:

  • An athletic and grounded body posture and movement, characterized by the weight being held on the balls of the feet, the knees bent, the hips pushed back, and the chest forward.
  • An asymmetry and polyphonic look/feel to the body, characterized by an equality of body parts. No limb or part has precedence, but they all work together both in a simultaneous and serialized fashion. The focus and weight shifting moves through various parts of the body; poly-centric.
  • Rhythmic movement. Not just a single rhythm being used in/with the body, multiple meters or rhythms are used. Articulated movement in the torso (chest, rib cage, pelvis, butt) identifying and emphasizing different rhythms.
  • Improvisation between dancers and on their own movements. Based on the rhythm section of the band.
  • A drawing of the beats, dancing in the space between the beats, pushing and pulling creating a sense of tension both in the body and the body moving through space, while remaining loose and relaxed.
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IllmaticDelta

IllmaticDelta

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POPPING (Fresno, california)

Popping is a street dance and one of the original funk styles that came from Fresno, California during the early 1980s. The dance is based on the technique of quickly contracting and relaxing muscles to cause a jerk in the dancer's body, referred to as a pop or a hit. This is done continuously to the rhythm of a song in combination with various movements and poses.[1]

Closely related illusory dance styles and techniques are often integrated into popping to create a more varied performance. These dance styles include the robot, waving and tutting. However, popping is distinct from breaking and locking, with which it is often confused. A popping dancer is commonly referred to as a popper.

As one of the earliest funk styles, popping is closely related to hip hop dancing. It is often performed in battles, where participants try to outperform each other in front of a crowd, giving room for improvisation and freestyle moves that are seldom seen in shows and performances, such as interaction with other dancers and spectators. Popping and related styles such as waving and tutting have also been incorporated into the electronica dance scene to some extent, influencing new styles such as liquid and digits and turfing.

Contents

Variations
Animation
A style and a technique where the dancer imitates film characters being animated by stop motion. The technique of moving rigidly and jerky by tensing muscles and using techniques similar to strobing and the robot makes it appear as if the dancer has been animated frame by frame. Walt Disney was the first to use this term, referring to his character Steam Boat Willie’s motions as “the animation dance” in 1929. This style was heavily inspired by the dynamation films created by Ray Harryhausen, such as The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958).[3]


Boogaloo
Boogaloo or boog style is a loose and fluid dance style trying to give the impression of a body lacking bones, partly inspired by animated movies and cartoons. It utilizes circular rolls of various body parts, such as the hips, knees and head, as well as isolation and sectioning, like separating the rib cage from the hip. It also makes heavy use of angles and various steps and transitions to get from one spot to the next. It was developed in 1975 by Boogaloo Sam. In the original boogaloo you do not pop, but combined with popping it becomes the electric boogaloo, the signature style of The Electric Boogaloos (the dance crew).[1]



Main article: Electric boogaloo (dance)

Tutting/King Tut
Inspired by the art of Ancient Egypt (the name derived from the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun, colloquially known as "King Tut"), tutting exploits the body's ability to create geometric positions (such as boxes) and movements, predominantly with the use of right angles. It generally focuses on the arms and hands, and includes sub-styles such as finger tutting.[4]
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LOCKING (cali)

Locking is a style of funk dance, which is today also associated, but not to be confused with hip hop. The name is based on the concept of locking movements, which basically means freezing from a fast movement and "locking" in a certain position, holding that position for a short while and then continuing in the same speed as before. It relies on fast and distinct arm and hand movements combined with more relaxed hips and legs. The movements are generally large and exaggerated, and often very rhythmic and tightly synced with the music. Locking is quite performance oriented, often interacting with the audience by smiling or giving them a high five, and some moves are quite comical in nature.

Locking was originally danced to traditional funk music, such as that produced or performed by James Brown. Funk music is still commonly favored by locking dancers and used by many competitions such as the locking division of Juste Debout. Locking movements create a strong contrast towards the many fast moves that are otherwise performed quite continuously, combined with mime style performance and acting towards the audience and other dancers. Locking includes quite a lot of acrobatics and physically demanding moves, such as landing on one's knees and the split. These moves often require knee protection of some sort.

The beginning of Locking can be traced to one man, Don Campbell. In the late 1960s he put together several fad dances adding moves of his own (known as the "Lock") when performing. The original lock was created by accident: Campbell couldn't do a move called the 'Funky Chicken' and stopped at a particular point whilst moving his arms, creating a 'locking' effect.[1][2] He wasn't able to perform it fluently, for he couldn't remember which step to take next. (Even the acting towards the audience was spontaneous: when people started laughing at Don because of his unfamiliar moves, he responded by pointing at them.) These halts soon became popular as Don added them into his performances. The resulting dance was called Campbellocking, which was later shortened to Locking. In the early 1970s this set off a movement of Locking dance groups, notably Campbell's group The Lockers. Other lockers Jimmy "Scoo B Doo" Foster, Greggory "Campbellock Jr." Pope, Tony "GoGo" Lewis, Fred "Mr Penguin" Berry (a.k.a. Rerun), Leo "Fluky Luke" Williamson, Damita Jo Freeman and others also helped set the foundation for the locking dance and clothes style.

Clothes style can consist of loud striped socks, pegged pants that stopped at the knees, bright colorful satin shirts with big collars, big colorful bow ties, gigantic Apple Boy hats, and white gloves.
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electric boogaloo (cali)

Electric boogaloo (sometimes mistakenly referred to as electric boogie) is a funk style of hip hop dance closely related to popping. It became the signature style of the dance group started in the 1970s, the Electric Boogaloos. Along with electric boogaloo they also popularized popping and many of its related styles.

It is characterized as a fluid leg-oriented style danced to funk music, utilizing rolls of the hips, knees, legs, and head, which was later combined with popping.[1]
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