The rise of shows such as So You Think You Can Dance and America’s Best Dance Crew led to a boom of interest in hip hop as a dance genre. Similar to the music genre, hip hop dancing is a product of specific regions, and in the case of American, hip hop dancers are the product of their respective regions (East Coast, West Coast, “Dirty” South, and Midwest). In the case of this study, I choose to focus on a specific community within the East Coast; namely, the New York/New Jersey dance community. This tight-knit community consists mostly of Asian-Americans and many of the participants have developed personal relationships amongst each other both inside and outside of the community. My goal is to understand the two major components of any dance community: the teacher and the student. I have chosen individuals that I have either danced with either as a peer in a class setting, a teammate, or as a student in his or her class. My personal experience with them as dancers reinforces the information I gained from my interviews. Despite differences in skill level (advanced, intermediate, and novice), there are shared themes amongst these dancers which theoretically can be applied to the New York/New Jersey as a whole.
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