UC Berkeley

The significance of dance improvisation in the black radical tradition has yet to receive close attention within the fields of performance, black studies and dance—especially as a youth culture based in California. This dissertation contributes to building a new archive of vernacular styles, innovated in the greater Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay Areas between 1965-1985 and foundational to hip hop’s widely cited emergence in New York. At the height of black power, funk music and gay liberation movements, these dances were generally prohibited from formal study within the protected institutional space of private dance studios and concert stages, giving rise to the umbrella term “street dance.” Street dancers studied street movements, experimenting with dance in non-studio spaces—city streets, neighborhood house parties, playgrounds, parks, school gyms, private and underground social clubs. I argue that street dance draws theoretical force from this informal status that challenges assumptions of where and how the study of dance happens, retaining in its practices and politics an alliance with a discourse of the street. I theorize the relation of aesthetics and politics through kinesthesia, the body’s “sixth” sense of motion historically devalued by Cartesian dualism, to argue that key principles of street dance break down conceptual divisions of collective/individual, innovation/tradition, sound/movement, and choreography/improvisation. I use the idea of (kin) aesthetic politics to ask how street dance might imagine alternative modes of relating that define performances of being connected and dislocated, belonging and dispossession, escape and capture. I create a vocabulary for the theoretical study of street dance, using oral history and performance ethnography to draw on the discourse and lived practices of street dancers and informed by my own experiences as a street dancer since the early 1990s.