Press:

Out of the Streets, Onto the Dance Floor
By Pat Rogers
The beat is insistent. It pulses and moves without words a track that seems to be generated by electronics. A quick glance around the room reveals kids jutting their shoulders or crossing and quickly unfurling their arms. Feet are moving. Knees bend. Bodies sway.

Sometimes, all eyes are on one youth as he or she makes up original moves to the music. Other times, everyone in the room emulates the dance instructor moving inside a circle of kids, their faces betraying the intensity of their concentration. But smiles are more commonplace as new moves are tried or well-loved ones revisited.

Welcome to hip-hop for kids, where learning how to create your own moves is king and no costumes are required. The only things they’ll needed are a desire to have fun, an interest in thinking outside the box and the ability to trust personal reactions to the music.

“Anything can be hip-hop,” said dance instructor Adam Baranello, who is co-teaching hip-hop dance in the Town of Southampton program. “If you’re a basketball player and you starting moving like you’re dribbling the ball, that can be hip-hop … The most important thing is to have fun with it.”

Hip-hop dancing calls for imaginative moves to rap music or beat-driven tracks. Born in the streets of New York in the early ’70s, the music started to catch on when deejays took snatches of beats and rhythms from records and disconnected them from soul, funk, jazz and Caribbean music. What resulted was music stripped down to raw and hard driving percussive rhythms.

With the music serving as the soundtrack for street parties, a hip-hop culture sprang to life and radiated outward. Spoken word and rhyme were added. Break dancing was born and abrupt theatrical and athletic movements became the way to groove to the music.

In the ’80s, hip-hop and rap became interchangeable and the music made its way into the mainstream—so much so that now it’s being taught by dance studios to kids using squeaky-clean versions of tunes with typically raunchy lyrics or tracks without words.

Hip-hop dancing for adults and teens can call for specific dance moves like breaking, up rocking, popping and locking. Other moves include swipes, spins, corkscrews and power moves. Athleticism comes into play. So do fancy step patterns and one-upmanship. Perhaps most of all, hip-hop dancing places a premium on imaginative new moves intended to outshine all the other people moving in the room.

This is the best place to begin when teaching the 8- to 12-year-old set, Mr. Baranello said. Instead of showing kids how to make classic hip-hop moves, he focuses on ways the kids can relate to the beat and translate it into joyful and cool-looking movement.

“Kids have a lot of trouble just making up their own moves,” Mr. Baranello said. “They know how to learn dance moves and repeat them. But when you ask them to just dance to the music, they don’t know how to do it. I kept hearing, ‘Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it,’ and knew what I had to teach was how they could learn to make up dance moves for themselves.”

To help promote spontaneity and self-expression, the kids gather in a circle and an invisible “power ball” is passed from one to the next while music plays. After “receiving” the ball, the person must make up a move and do it. The ball is then “thrown” to someone else, who makes up his or her own move.

The class claps and cheers for everyone as they give up their moves. Mr. Baranello and co-teacher Gail Benevente take their turns receiving the ball and dancing a move. Kids take what they see and make it their own. Soon, moves become looser and larger and self-consciousness starts to retreat.

Hip-hop is a hit with the kids taking it at a class offered by the Town of Southampton at the Arts and Crafts Center in Hampton Bays. Like Salvatore Valdespino, 10, of East Quogue. The only boy in the class, he said the class was a lot of fun.

“I like to wiggle,” he said. “I get to move around and wiggle. I can jump around and it’s okay.”

Kiara Quinonez, 11, of Hampton Bays, said she signed up after taking hip-hop classes at the Hampton Bays School of Dance. “It’s fun,” she said. “I wanted to do more of it, so I signed up for the class with my friend. I like the music and that you can do anything to it.”

Learning hip-hop is a way for kids to feel good about themselves, learn a little bit about a popular genre of music and discover how freeing dance can be.

“You can translate it to anything,” Mr. Baranello said. “In general, the kids will have better posture and more confidence when they walk down the hall. It’s fun. I hope they get the idea that dancing is cool.”

Mr. Baranello and Ms. Benevente both studied dance at Stony Brook before forming A&G Dance Company last year. They have taught dance and creative movement and have performed hip-hop at venues including the Vail-Leavitt Music Hall and the former RIFTA Theater, both in Riverhead.

The next session of Hip-Hop Dance for kids age 8 to 12 will be offered December 1 to 29 on Thursdays from 6 to 7 p.m. through the Town of Southampton Recreation Department. The fee is $40 for residents and $50 for non-residents.

A class for 10- to 17-year-olds on Wednesdays from 7 to 8 p.m. at the Southampton Town Recreation Center in Southampton, also led by A&G Dance Company, started on November 9 and runs through December 14. The fee is $75 for members and $96 for non-members.

Hip-hop classes are also offered at private dance studios at the Hampton Bays School of Dance in Hampton Bays, the Dance Centre of the Hamptons in Westhampton and the East End Dance Studio in Eastport.

Issue Date: Southampton Press 11-10-05