by Carly McElligott
Standing at the front of the empty classroom, with nothing but the music to keep her company, the frail, dark-haired figure picks a beat from the CD turner and starts bobbing her head in rhythm. Pointing to an imaginary opponent, she calls out, challenging the invisible dancer and inviting him to battle. She spins, slides and throws her arms out to the front, then steps back toward the stereo and restarts the song.
One by one, more bodies filter into the room, slipping off their street shoes as they approach the long stretch of hardwood floor. Dance students, all preparing for another day of popping, locking and breaking, fumble with their shoelaces or stretch from the sidelines, watching their instructor as she runs through choreography and gets ready for class.
Lowry Champion, shown here teaching advanced hip-hop, came to the UO in September of 2003
Lowry Champion, a graduate teaching fellow in the University of Oregon's department of dance, got her first exposure to hip-hop, an urban counterculture that incorporates various elements of dancing, spinning, mcing and tagging, when she was a sophomore majoring in dance and psychology at the University of Colorado Now, in her first year at the UO, Champion is spreading her knowledge not only of hip-hop dance but of hip-hop culture. One of her teaching mottos is to give credit where credit is due, making her hip-hop instruction vastly different from most of the other teachers in the dance department and more of a cultural experience than students expect.
An Introduction to Hip-Hop
She calls him "Larry"--the second generation B-Boy from the Bronx who first introduced her to a world outside of ballet and modern dancing. His older sister was a first-generation B-Girl and a member of the Rock Steady Crew, so Larry knew the culture firsthand. He came to Colorado to teach and gave Champion the opportunity to learn. Larry exposed Champion to the roots of hip-hop, free of misconceptions and the influence of popular culture. Without ever taking hip-hop in a studio, Champion learned the essentials of both the East Coast and West Coast hip-hop styles, as well as the history of their origins and their evolution.
Hip-hop's roots date back to 1968 when two dancers from Brooklyn, known as Rubber Band and Apache, took some popular new street dancing into the New York City discos. These dances, known today as "rockin" and "uprockin," marked the beginning of a new style, which would be deemed hip-hop dance.
At the clubs in Boulder, Champion went out dancing with the legendary likes of Boogaloo Sam and Don Campbell, some of the founding fathers of hip-hop dancing. Boogaloo Sam, who founded the Electronic Boogaloo Lockers in 1977 (they would later be known as the Electric Boogaloos), is known as the forefather of popping, also known as the boogaloo style. Campbell, who earned some national recognition in his 20s when he danced on "Soul Train," is also a pioneer of hip-hop dancing, developing a style known today as locking.
These styles, which Champion incorporates into each of her classes, are part of the "back-to-basics" when it comes to both teaching and learning hip-hop. Michael Jackson, after all, didn't invent the moonwalk. His signature step, as it turns out, is just floating with some flair, and Champion makes sure that by the time her students leave her hip-hop class, they understand the reality of the hip-hop revolution.