Street Dance x Screen Dance: A Visual Call & Response

KTRi is proposing to organize & host Visual Play, a 60 minute, roundtable panel discussion featuring five panelists and a moderator. The impetus of this panel is to highlight the sphere of influence between Street/Club Dancer communities and the mass media by exploring how both entities play with movement and exchange it. Visual Play panelists will elucidate the feedback loop of influence and inspiration between street/club dance forms and movement based visual culture as depicted in broadcast and social media. Through organizing and moderating, Visual Play, KTRi aims to explore how playing, improvising & exchanging movement via a screen has mediated foundational vocabulary in various Street Dance forms; impacted the portrayal of Street Dance Culture for dance civilians and shaped the sphere of influence of Krump, Lite Feet, Vogue, House Dance and Flexxin. 

The body of knowledge that informs this panel emerged from KTRi’s members’ individual and collective historical analysis of Street Dance Media. The following paragraph offers a glimpse of the socio-cultural and historical connections we aim to illustrate through this panel. It is a contains a summary of iconic media appearances that are celebrated in Street Dance Culture. 

Currently a high value source of visual content for social media sites like Tiktok & Instagram, Street Dancers have been in extended creative conversation or interplayed with various forms of media since the development of Locking in the early 1970’s. Members of the seminal group, The Lockers are featured in the documentary Wattstax; were Soul Train dancers; were cast onWhat’s Happening?, and performed on the Johnny Carson show. Joe Conzo, Charlie Ahearn and Martha Cooper are three of the media artists who first captured b-boys or break dancers on film in the 1980s. Street Dance pioneers, Frosty Freeze and Fable debuted b-boying on the silver screen when they were featured in Flashdance. Willie Ninja described how he watched Kung Fu moves as inspiration for poses and transitions for Old Way (Vogue) poses in a segment of the documentary, Paris is Burning.         

 


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