Hip Hop Culture in Abeyance: The Practice of “Rap Dance” in China in the 1990s

Tianyi Wang, Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts
Mujun Zhou, Zhejiang University

A common view of Hip Hop dance in China is that the development of Hip Hop culture in this country involved a rupture. The failure of the 1989 student movement put an end to the spread of “breaking” (pili wu) as a subculture in the 1980s. It was not until the mid 2000s, when the entertainment industry became developed, did the culture return to the mainstream media as “street dance” (jiewu). This article challenges this view by examining the practice of “rap dance” (rap wu) in the 1990s. “Rap dance” consisted of culture and artistic activities organized around disco hall and roller rink by marginalized social groups. Using oral history methods, we trace the development of rap dancers, focusing on how the social and technological environment shaped their learning experiences. We find that rap dancers had played important roles in sustaining Hip Hop culture in China. Rap dancers’ communication with the international community transformed earlier modes of learning dance, which emphasized imitating poses. It was also during this period that the idea of “grooving,” a mode that prioritized the understanding of dynamics in movement, began to take root. On the other hand, we find that rap dancers were often distant from the ideas of solidarity and rebellion inherent in the Hip Hop movement originating in African American communities. We suggest that this partially explains why the culture community was later quickly commercialized in the 2000s.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 150. The Chinese Reform as Social Science History (I): A Hundred Protagonists