Negotiating the Metaspace: Hip Hop Dance Artists in the Space of UK Dance Theater by Paul Sadot
Abstract
With patronage from powerful mainstream institutions and corporations, Hip Hop dance theater (HHDT) is under the influence of cultural industry conditions, thereby having become a commodity that is, in its ascendancy, part of the United Kingdom’s neoliberal creative economy. This chapter argues that long-established notions of “what hip hop dance is” are perpetuated in HHDT productions via a type of choreopolicing. This wider space, or metaspace, of supervision is inhabited by interconnected elements including mentorships, funding strategies, and the state-led commodification of arts and culture. The chapter examines how these processes have an impact on the agency and (im)mobility of artists working in the HHDT mold and connect to the wider processes of gentrification and “culturfication” (a neologism for the manufacture of culture) that presently permeate London’s sociocultural, political, and artistic landscape.
Engaging with a broad range of research and performance genres, The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Dance Studies offers the most comprehensive research on Hip Hop dance to date. Filling a lacuna in both Hip Hop and dance studies, the Handbook places practitioners' voices at the forefront and in dialogue with theoretical insights, rooted in critical race theory, anticolonialism, intersectional feminism, and more. Volume editors Mary Fogarty and Imani Kai Johnson have included influential dancers and scholars from around the world: from B-Boys Ken Swift, YNOT, and Storm, to practitioners of locking, waacking and House dance styles such as E. Moncell Durden, Terry Bright Kweku Ofosu, Fly Lady Di, and Leah McFly, and innovative academic work on Hip Hop dance by the most prominent researchers in the field. Throughout the Handbook contributors address individual and social histories of dance, Afrodiasporic and global lineages, the contribution of B-Girls from Honey Rockwell to Rokafella, the "studio-fication" of Hip Hop styles, and moves into theatre, TV, and the digital/social media space.