Why are hip hop and B-boys currently popular forms of dance? Was it a purely a social trend driving the spreading of the culture of street dancing? Or did someone see an economic opportunity with the music, the clothing etc. Or is it simply mankind’s makeup to be forever in pursuit of something new and something different? And when this meets with mass media marketing and promotion we have a new trend. But will it have lasting impact? Only time will tell.

Another very big factor is if business or the political powers can see a profit in assisting and developing the art form for its own business growth potential. Think of cycling and running and how big business sponsors have come forth to assist and create and fund events. A few years ago it was tennis. And guess what? All the equipment, clothing extra goodies required are all sold by these businesses. Cycling, athletics and selected sports have been developed in a large part into the culture of this country based on business, political and social interests. And let us not think about Soccer and what has been spent and for what purpose? Come on dance people get wise! Let us creatively sell our cultural abilities.

But back to the dance forms. How much of where we dance impacts on what we dance? If you have to dance in a small space obviously traveling steps are not much of an option so the steps become smaller and more focused. Working in a large area with high ceilings on a well sprung floor will encourage large steps involving travel and the use of involved floor patterning. So like the chicken and the egg which comes first the movement or the space?

With a good command of a language and a wide vocabulary one can communicate many ideas, feelings, thoughts and stories. Think what happens when you are in a foreign country. Suddenly you are using very exaggerated arm movements and facial expressions to make up for your lack of words and grammar.

Watching these B-boys I was fascinated how they each individually explored what their bodies could do in the space they found themselves in. Lacking a grammar of dance or movement form from which to start they had to create their movements from within themselves, but based on messages they were receiving, in this case, from me and the storyline I was following.

I think the survival of different dance forms is determined to a large extent, like a language, on the development of its grammar and the ability that it has to adapt to changing times and requirements of the country it finds itself in. Some dance forms have taken the basic ballet grammar and used that as a starting point for developing different ways of moving just as certain languages were once offshoots of Latin which is a root language now and not the living language it once was. Had there been no root language how would the spoken and written word have developed? A number of dance initiatives have attempted to create their own language of movement to create something different. I am not sure how successful this has been. I am judging or assessing success in this case as survival and prospering in a meaningful manner over a lengthy period of time and not only in one person’s lifetime.

I started off thinking that whilst the grammar of dance and the grammar of a language had many similarities dance was nevertheless different because our bodies are our instruments. But when you consider that when one speaks one uses various parts of the anatomy and when one dances one uses the whole body and that bodies generally function according to a similar manufacturing design is there a difference? Letters in the alphabet correspond to movements in dance. Combining selected letters creates words and combining selected movements one creates steps. These words or movements are used to impart a story, an idea, an emotion. What happens after that is the difference between the writing of Solzhenitsyn and Enid Blyton and in the dance field between the great classical ballet Giselle and the great musical West Side Story.