Dancers need to remember and reproduce complex sequences communicating characters, emotions and even whole stories to audiences purely through movement. Dance is also a very effective—and enjoyable—method of exercise that has benefits for the heart, lungs, muscles and bones as well as improving coordination, agility, balance, spatial awareness and flexibility and helping to prevent excessive weight gain, which has become a topical issue in recent years. It also has many of the social benefits such as developing confidence and team building .
What is Street dance?
Street dance is an umbrella term, used to describe dance styles at more everyday spaces such as schools, streets and music videos.
The beauty of street dance is that it encourages individuality and
originality, and lets dancers interpret the existing moves freely and
even invent new ones to create a personal style of their own.
Improvisation is the heart of most street dances.
The importance of fusing cultural dance forms in street dance.
Elements of African dance can be found in street dance. It is the polycentric movement in African dance (segmented movement of shoulders, chest, arms, legs etc) that internalises the rhythm of the music. This has been transposed into modern street dance styles such as body-popping. It is for this reason, why the dance routines based on African dance must be explored in order to understand how very complex movements "inside" the body are created to the rhythm, as opposed to the movement through space of the whole body that plays the most important role in many European choreographies.
Asian dance plays an important role as well as it opens up a new avenue exploring how the slightest movement of the hands or eyes can portray a message. The use of expressive dance in street dance transforms the static regurgitated dance routine into a powerful and meaningful dance piece.