Title: Breaking Expectations: The Skills and Values of Hip-Hop Dance
For Temple faculty and staff only. Registration required. Lunch provided.
Hosted by Dr. Robert T. Stroker, Dean and Vice Provost for the Arts
Description: Dance Professor by day, and b-girl by night, Dr. Sherril Dodds talks about her work on hip-hop dance within Philadelphia. She will set the scene with a brief history of breaking (sometimes also known as breakdancing or b-boying) and provide a demonstration of its key movement characteristics (with a little help from some experts). She will also talk about her research with Temple Breakers, a student-led organization, and Hip Hop Fundamentals, a community education program with whom she regularly collaborates. Drawing on photographs, a short documentary, and a little audience participation, we will explore the skills and values engendered within breaking as an embodied practice.
Biography: Dr. Sherril Dodds is a Professor of Dance in Boyer College of Music and Dance, and Director of the Institute of Dance Scholarship. Her books include Dance on Screen (2001), Dancing on the Canon (2011), Bodies of Sound (co-edited with Susan C. Cook, 2014), The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Competition (2019), and The Bloomsbury Companion to Dance Studies (2019). She has been a visiting scholar at Trondheim University in Norway, Griffith University in Australia, Stanford University in the USA, and Blaise-Pascal University in France. She is a founder member of the PoPMOVES research group, and she was awarded the 2015 Gertrude Lippincott prize for her article, ‘The Choreographic Interface: Dancing Facial Expression in Hip Hop and Neo-burlesque striptease’. She is also a novice b-girl.