French Moves: The Cultural Politics of le hip hop by Felicia McCarren (review)

Felicia McCarren’s new book, French Moves: The Cultural Politics of le hip hop, offers an original perspective on contemporary hip-hop theater. McCarren begins with the suggestion that hip-hop provides an escape from one’s family and cultural background. Hip-hop is rarely spoken about in this way, and yet her evidence points to such a possibility after a ten-year research project in France. She argues that hip-hop is simultaneously about inclusion and rage. Hip-hop not only addresses social problems in France, in accordance with dance’s civic status, but also offers an outlet for the expression of rage about the inequalities faced by minority youth. McCarren writes: “While French hip hop values inclusiveness, hip hoppers have themselves been excluded” (xiv).

The majority of scholarship about hip-hop dance theater focuses on addressing the works of American (Chang 2009; Davis 2006) and French artists (Kauffmann 2004; Shapiro 2003, 2004). The American scholarship has tended to be more concerned with defining the genre of hip-hop theater and canonizing the important artists. The French scholarship has focused on sociological perspectives, considering how aesthetics are informed by institutionalization. As an American researching in France, McCarren relies on her collaborations with French sociologists to situate her canonizing of French hip-hop theater artists. Hip-hop theater is a genre that mixes hip-hop aesthetics with theatrical conventions, and, as McCarren points out, France has produced some of the best choreographers working in this genre to date.

On the one hand, “hip-hop theater” is a self-definition given by artists themselves who want to account for their roots in hip-hop culture and their commitment to the form. On the other hand, hip-hop theater is recognized as a marketing tool, used to encourage new theater audiences. In Eisa Davis’s (2006) account of the emergence of the genre, there is an offer of broad eclecticism, with interludes of albums, clips from narrative films, and festival circuits, all of which are considered to be contributing forces in the development of the form. If Davis’s list includes dance companies such as Ghettoriginal, Full Circle, and the work of Jonzi D, Roberta Uno (2006) adds the iconic Philadelphia-based Rennie Harris. This growing canon of important artists is complicated by the earliest accounts of breaking as a cultural practice within hip-hop culture.

In 1981, Sally Banes suggested that breaking in New York City began as a folk form, and a game played by boys to assert their individual identities and local ties to friends (Banes 1994). She suggests that the form eventually became theatrical as it started to draw attention from outsiders. Jonzi D, artistic director of Breakin’ Convention, the largest hip-hop theater festival in the world, argues that hip-hop theater has in fact always had theatrical components and is the contemporary dance of our time. Early examples of hip-hop theater as a hybrid form performed on the proscenium stage include Mr. Wiggles and PopMaster Fabel’s work with Ann Marie DeAngelo, the artistic director of Ballet de Monterrey in Mexico (Fogarty 2012). Building on this, Ghettoriginal produced the first hip-hop musicals, including the 1995 cult classic “Jam on the Groove,” which toured to France (Fogarty 2012). However, the term “hip-hop theater” did not arise until the late 1990s and early 2000s to account for the work of particular artists (Davis 2006).

In French Moves, Felicia McCarren expands the coverage to include some of the most exciting hip-hop dance choreographers and performers working in France today. She discusses Franck II Louise’s Drop It!, one of the strongest examples of hip-hop ballet internationally, alongside the abstractions offered by Compagnie Choream’s Epsilon. Yiphum Chiem’s Apsara is another work that is analyzed in relation to Hélène Cixous’s L’histoire...