Asian Americans and Hip Hop Dance: The Choreo Culture

For the past couple decades, young Asian Americans have built a culture within their communities and a sense of belonging through hip hop dance. Their endeavors have ultimately created professional dance companies out of the sheer passion of choreography that has led to a number of mainstream milestones we have seen through America’s Best Dance Crew, So You Think You Can Dance, music videos and even the rise of K-Pop.

Urban Dance part of Texas’ annual Gooddphil Games. The GoodPhil Games is a three-day conference and competition that unites all of the Filipino Student Associations (FSA) across Texas and Oklahoma. The competition consists of cultural dance, spirit dance, modern (hip-hop/urban) dance, and a two-day sports tournament.

For communities that have a demographic that is comprised mostly of individuals that are of Asian descent, chances are, there are going to be a multitude of social groups that are connected through a shared interest in hip hop inspired choreography. Today, dance has slowly started to become something of a common hobby just like beloved sports: basketball and football. Many of these teams formed through a school campus and the school year would normally act as the dance season amongst these social groups and communities. But how did this all come to fruition?

The creation of these large congregations of Asian Americans showcasing their choreographical talents can date back to the late 1990s. During that time, many college students that are first or second-generation American would have found themselves to be welcomed by cultural clubs. In a large college campus, finding your own niche of friends is tough to wrestle with so meeting a group of students that share your culture and have similar experiences is an impactful feat. It just so happens that another commonality between these students would turn out to be a love for hip hop music and dance. One of the Asian American groups that would start to openly share their love for this genre of music in front of a large audience would be Filipino Americans.

Across many colleges and universities, Filipino clubs have an annual Pilipino Cultural Night that spans various performances that include traditional dances, modern dances, and theatre plays.

For most Filipino cultural clubs, the event that is normally the highlight of the year is Pilipino Cultural Night or PCN. PCN is normally an elaborate showcase that displays the Filipino culture and in the late 90s, during what some might call the height of hip hop and R&B, Filipino students started to add a “modern” section during PCN that displayed their common interest in hip hop. As years went by, these Filipino clubs would start to put more and more time and effort into creating their “modern” sets for PCN which would eventually lead to the birth of new organizations. These organizations were purposed for socializing over a shared love for hip hop and creating choreographed sets to move to the music that they would make mixtapes to.

ABDC’s Kaba Modern hails it roots from UC Irvine’s modern hip hop group Kababayan Modern.

Fast forward and now there is a growing number of organizations that still share the same purpose but the music is easier to access and the days of burning CDs are long gone. These organizations still have a large Asian American population because of their branching from those Filipino cultural clubs, but the growth would come more from the high school kids that watched the college PCNs looking forward to hopefully join the modern sets. As these hip hop clubs and teams branched off and became their own organizations, it would be the next generation of college students that would increase the numbers, wanting to be a part of something big with individuals that shared similar backgrounds. Today, although most of these large dance teams no longer promote a specific ethnic culture, it is still predominately Asian American due to the scene’s initial ties to collegiate Asian cultural clubs, more specifically to Filipino organizations and the practice of creating PCNs.

---