Sociologies (Feb 2013)
Les battles de Street Dance : un entre-deux culturel
Abstract
Street Dance, danced form stemming from hip-hop culture, has been developing since the 1990’s and is integrating more and more competitive confrontations named: Battles. These battles represent a particularly "sporty" practice of "dance-fight", characteristic of the young, popular and urban population of dancers. We show that the "sporty" features of battles contribute to transform the practice. This new form of competitive confrontation – trials and hierarchic organization of the participants assessed by judges – brings many changes to dancing itself. This competitive form brings about a rationalization of techniques, but it is not complete and we can observe a resistance to the standardization of practice. Finally, Street Dance appears as an ambivalent practice between supervised physical and technical performance and research of emotional dimension, between spectacular, commercial shows and competition with ranking of the competitors, between tradition and innovation. The originality of the battles contributes to shape a particular youth culture (Hodkinson & Deicke, 2007). The flexible form of the sportification process, the characteristics of which we shall study, places break-dancing in an ambivalent position and turns it into an activity appreciated by the young people.
