Kids Make Dance combines child-centered dance-making with digital technologies and social media. Our first pilot project, Kids Make Hip Hop, took place in July 2009 in Queens, New York. For this project, we invited children of all ages with and without backgrounds in dance to create their own hip hop routines and document their work with low-cost video camcorders and digital cameras.

On this website, we invite you to enjoy the extensive multimedia content, learn about the ideas that informed this project, and read about the dance and Internet educators who launched this initiative.

Slide show of kids creating and showing their AKA names in graffiti. The graffiti wall  served as backdrop for the demonstrations, improvisations and performances, while giving them hands-on experience with the historical context of graffiti as an art form and an element of hip hop.

A key component of the Kids Make Hip Hop project was that all participants created multimedia content (videos and pictures) of the dance-making, art-making and other creative projects throughout the week. Here is a Flickr slide show of kids shooting videos and pictures:

Pictures of students taking videos of hip hop performance:

After kids wrote their own poetry, they joined-up with a fellow student who created an improvised hip hop routine:

Blue

My name is Kristen A.K.A. Blue
You wanna see me dance I could show you some moves too.
I don’t play around when it comes to break dancing
I’m too fast for you I only stay on hands, man.
I’m the color of the sky and as fresh as the water.
I do what I do to make you say “OH!”

Student reads poetry to the improvised dancing of hip hop teacher Carlos:

Butterfly

People can’t catch me cause I
Fly high and I fly low
I can dance all around you and make you dizzy
All you’ll see are my colors as you stand in awe.

Kids demonstrate a combination of break dance skills following morning warm-up.

In the following video, Carlos discusses hip hop history coverage on previous day of program:

Thanks to Roger Corrales for his logo design for Kids Make Hip Hop:

Kids participated in a “freeze” exercise where they held a hip hop pose. This exercise was done in conjunction with a photo shoot of the student’s freezes, which you can see in the following Flickr slideshow: