Hipathon

Stompin' at the Strand

by Marcia B. Siegel

Imagine a high-school basketball game on top of a dance-studio recital, and staged with the loosely organized frenzy of a rock concert. That's what the "Hip Hop Boston 1999" show sponsored by Dance Umbrella was like Saturday night at the Strand Theatre. Some 140 young performers, most of them under 20, representing 14 different groups, hit the stage at full power, and the audience answered with a nonstop hormonal scream. The event couldn't help being a success.

Hip-hop has probably acquired an esoteric technical vocabulary, but on stage it still looks like street dancing, minimally choreographed to showcase agility and bravado. It seems to fall into three main types. There's the bouncing up and down, foot-into-the-ground, African-derived basic step dance: hip-hop. There's the acrobatic solo break dance that reveals each dancer's special skills. And then there are the eccentric moves: moonwalking, popping, body music, and as many other inventions as there are enterprising dancers.

The groups presented themselves in a variety of modes, from outright entertainment companies to schools with high-minded social and cultural goals, and they projected a wild spectrum of styles. Boys to Men Academy had neat rows of boys, all dressed alike in spic-and-span pants and jerseys. Full Circle had assorted street characters who seemed able to communicate only by topping one another's tricks. The Floorlords waded through stage smoke and boasted their own trigger-happy DJ.

MCs Wyatt Jackson and Naheem Allah opened the show with a group of kids from the new Boston Arts Academy, in a staged rehearsal that got out of hand as the routine crumbled into individual riffs. But most of the other groups didn't try for any theatrical pretext. They just did their stuff, sometimes in cohesive group routines that allowed small groups and individuals to emerge, sometimes in bits that jumped from one musical fragment to a totally different one when a classroom combination was used up.

So after the long, late drive home in the fog, and after my ears stopped ringing, I tried to think what is hip-hop after all, and what is it offering to the kids on the stage and those in the audience. Besides being, like all dance, a physical, social, and imaginative outlet, hip-hop is a vehicle for adolescent pride, ego projection, and aspiration. Some groups stressed the connections among hip-hop, other forms of black dance, and the roots of the African diaspora. Late in the program, United Roots ensemble chanted a new-agey message of solidarity and inclusion -- touting one family, one house, the healing powers of our music. They were the only ones unable to ratchet up the audience's enthusiasm, but maybe by that time even this crowd was getting tired.

Not all the hopes were so noble. Some troupes openly described themselves as being in the entertainment business. Trip Hop, a set of teenage triplets, already have made the Nike Elite Dance Team and hooked up with Puma. There was a gleam in the eye of the feistiest, littlest kids and the provocative, tough-ass girl groups that could have been anticipating a hit video or a lucrative industrial show, or even a long-term recording contract. And Deck.13, a pair of guys in red sequined shirts and pants, flaunted their spectacular abs in a routine of snaky muscular moves coordinated to a tape studded with sound effects. There was no information about where else they perform this kind of number. "That's the other side of hip-hop," cracked Wyatt Jackson with some embarrassment.

But whether they were spinning out of control on shoulders, heads, or rolled-up spines, whether they flipped or stomped, wiggled suggestively or heaved into manic Charlestons and Lindys, the beat drove them on. Whatever the music, and there were many genres of pop over the course of the evening, the dancing followed a consistent, deafening pulse. Unlike tap, with its fabulous rhythmic interplay, hip-hop sticks to regularity, punching in-out, stomp-spin-stomp-thrust. Maybe that's what makes these groups so strong, why some of them fell so naturally into robotlike patterns, why they do unison routines so much of the time, and why there's so little contact between members in the course of dancing, except for the competitive thrust-and-parry of capoeira style.

The sameness of the rhythms wore me out before intermission. But when the fast slapping and clapping of body music suddenly broke through this automatic din, in the groups Nia and the Girlz, the Jam'nastics, and Special Force, I felt re-energized, almost relaxed.