Hiplet (dance style)

Hiplet ( hip-LAY) is a newly recognized dance style that fuses ballet with hip hop. The term was first coined in 2009, but in May 2016, dancers from the Chicago Multi-Cultural Dance Center (CMDC) performing hiplet gained widespread popularity after a video of the dancers attained thousands of views on Instagram. ABC News subsequently invited the dancers to perform on a televised broadcast. The creation of this genre is attributed to Homer Hans Bryant of the CMDC. The CMDC is currently the only studio in the world that trains dancers in hiplet.

Hiplet is notable for its combination of ballet-style movement, which is ethnographically Eurocentric and primarily white, and hip-hop, which is rooted in and grown out of African dance and rich urban culture from communities of color. With its strong roots in traditional movement, dancers train to advance to pointe through years of practice. This piece provides earlier examples of artists attempting new types of movement by contending with racialized and gendered histories of different dance styles, stretching back to the mid-twentieth century, setting a precedent for hiplet to form.

This fusion also has a strong history in the dance world, and draws upon many prior endeavors to combine different styles. Homer is helping black dancers express a more contemporary and culturally reflective art form that expresses who they are and where they come from. This provides young, predominantly black, dancers of color the chance to train in an art that still largely excludes them.

Hiplet is an example of performance as media consumption, with its path from Instagram, to television, and most recently, to TEDx. The dancers were invited to perform on Good Morning America Digital media and recordings present a revolutionary way to preserve dance history, and engage in participatory media culture. Pitfalls of widespread access to dance materials are expressed; viewing a live performance and viewing a recording are very different experiences. Dance’s digital archive interacts with the cultural context of its origins and viewing, providing room for new interpretations of work. Digitization is a means of creation, split between recalling an original and existing independently. It also functions under several other Instagram categories, including self-expression, social interaction, and escapism.