Auditioning with Hip Hop Dance Moves

Series Summary

Hip hop dancing covers a large range of styles and specific moves and techniques, but the cornerstone of the style is undoubtedly break dancing. Over time, that so-called old school way of dancing and participating in hip hop culture has evolved into many different off-shoots. Funk dancing, popping and locking, jigging, freaking, krump, and hyphy are examples of types of hip hop dance, and each style contains certain moves that distinguish it from other forms. Throughout the world, there are competitions and there is no doubt as to the influence hip hop and that style of dancing have had on the cultures it touches. Here in the United States, many people opt to take hip hop dancing lessons, and although some critics believe that teaching orchestrated steps in that fashion is adverse to the true roots of the culture and the history of the dance, many people enjoy taking the lessons and learning how to break with the best of them. Does all of this sound like Greek to you? Turn on your favorite music video station and watch for ten minutes, you'll know exactly what you're up against.

In this free video series, watch as expert choreographer and hip hop dance instructor Safi A. Thomas teaches how to audition for hip hop dance. Learn different blade techniques for auditions, the different segments of a hip hop dance audition, how to control your body and dynamics, what the definition stage of an audition is, how to present your personality, how to connect the hip hop dance moves, the translation stage of a hip hop audition, how to freestyle with popping and breaking, and how to add your own personality to the choreography.

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village, I'm Safi Thomas form the Blade Academy here in New York City. These are my dancers from the Blade Academy and Hop Dance Conservatory, and we're here to today to teach you about hip hop dance audition techniques. So you want to do music videos, you want to do tour, you want to do professional work and you want to do stuff from the industry. How are you going to do it? Well, there are auditions. There are auditions all over the place. There's what's called open auditions and then you have closed auditions or agency auditions. Well, no matter what type of audition you're going to, you need to know what are the techniques in order to do that. What are the techniques that are going to make you succeed as a dancer. What's going to make you stand out. What we're going to go over in these few clips are things that are going to help you as a dancer to pick up choreography quickly, make sure you're giving the choreographer what they want, and to develop yourself as a dancer."