In the beginning, there was dance. This isn’t hyperbole: Archaeologists can trace the origins of dance back to the Stone Age. Dance was a means of ritual and healing, of connection and expression. Movement evolved over time — to traditional African dance and European ballroom, to ballet and modern, to tap, to jazz, to funk — and yet, dance’s purpose is no different now than it was in prehistoric times.Dance is, and always has been, wordless communication, and there is perhaps no dance form with more to say than hip-hop.
"They're not just movements for the sake of doing the movement," says E. Moncell Durden, assistant professor of practice at USC's Glorya Kaufman School of Dance. "You're actually saying something. It's based out of a type of conversation that exists in a community."
Hip-hop dance emerged in the predominantly black and Latino communities of New York City's South Bronx in the mid-1970s, on the heels of hip-hop music's genesis, and soon spread throughout the country. "Hip-hop dance involves two dances: breaking and social dances. That's it. Nothing else is hip-hop," explains Durden. Social dances, which began to take shape in the mid-'80s
