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Why is the study of dance history important

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Why is the study of dance history important?
To fully understand the history of dance we must look at what dance means to us today in our every day lives. How does dance influence what you do on a day to day basis, how has it shaped who you’ve come to be. I see dance today as both an art form, and something used socially to draw people together usually for celebratory purposes. Living in New York gives you the opportunity to come across various forms of dance. You could be taking the train and encounter break dancers giving you a performance, expressing themselves in order to survive. You could go to virtually any park in the city and encounter spontaneous dance shows of people showcasing their talents to the public. You also run into many …show more content…

It helped a generation of young poor people a way to express what they were going through and to fight against it in an artistic expression. It was a more harsh aggressive form of dance, that helped bring on and shape a new era. With it it brought a new sense of American culture, influencing many one the way they act, dress, and communicate in social settings. It formed many peoples identities by giving them something they could identify with. Something that could culturally bring people together.
Diedre Sklar,wrote an article in the DCA (Dance Critics Association) news, titled “Five Premises for a Culturally Sensitive Approach to Dance”. The very first premise, is the one I can connect most to hip-hop. “Movement knowledge is a kind of cultural knowledge,” hip-op movement is a cultural knowledge of the time period. A dance that shows the progression of broken down barriers and the submergence of the celebration of diversity. “All movement must be considers as an embodiment of cultural knowledge, a kinesthetic equivalent, that is not quite equivalent, to using the local language. Movement is an essential aspect of culture that has been undervalued and under examined and even trivialized.” We can consider hip-hop “an embodiment of cultural knowledge” because of when, where and how it emerged and became popularized. Hip-hops emergence out of less fortunate African American communities in the Bronx and Brooklyn just

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