My first encounter with hip-hop dance was as a young adult discovering Paris — the place I was about to live to pursue my undergraduate studies. Naturally, since I had freshly moved to this new city, I started sightseeing the iconic touristic spots - La Tour Eiffel, L’Opéra de Paris, Les Champs-Elysées, Montmartre, La Bastille and Les Quartier Latins. However, it wasn’t until the second time I walked by these historical monuments that these spaces were activated for me; I witnessed street dancers - immigrants from Northern and Sub-Saharan Africa - performing and cyphering in public and through their movement I connected with these institutional spaces in ways that I hadn’t before.

As a young and naïve tourist, I was expecting to see pantomimes, painters of the Seine and singers performing old romantic French songs at these iconic landmarks; but like the other tourists around me, I was drawn to the hip-hop beats and the highly energetic performance of Africanist aesthetics. The hip-hop dancers had made those old French streets their own; they were popping, locking and breaking at the centre of a circle that was formed by tourists who had gathered round to get a glimpse of a show.

I was struck by the difference in vibe between my first and second encounters of these Parisian spots. The first time I went, they were just places, but the second time, when the cypher was going on and strangers from around the world were partaking in a call-and-response and exchanging energy in a communal way, that was a liveness that was out of this world. The dancers had hip-hop-ized that space.

After following multiple street crews around, sketching their dancing bodies, and jotting notes about my experiences, I eventually joined a street hip-hop dance crew. As an audience, I used to focus on the positive ways hip-hop dancers would transform and inject Western institutional spaces with an energy through their hip-hop-ization. It wasn’t until I experienced what it was like to dance hip-hop in the streets that I understood some of the implications associated with this practice.

For example, La PP (the local police) would intervene when the cypher couldn’t get any larger; they’d ask us to turn off the sound system and stop performing. The audience – who were eagerly anticipating the climax of our street shows - would boo the police who responded with “We have to maintain the law!” Even after the audience members sided with us, the police wouldn’t budge. Disappointed, the crowd would slowly dissipate leaving a beautiful, but less alive space behind.

In Paris, and in most Western places, performing street shows requires a permit. Whilst I understand why such regulations exist, they are barriers to artistic and cultural expression that only officially organised entities can apply for. But as I mentioned before, most street dancers I knew in Paris were immigrants of colour who often did not have the legal means to do so. In her book French Moves: The Cultural Politics of le hip hop, Felicia McCarren also noted that most hip-hop dancers in Paris came from North and Sub-Saharan Africa or overseas French territories such as Martinique. I was actually one of the only dancers who was female, a full-time student, and from a non-African descent background. I would see approximatively 50 street dancers on a regular basis, either at training, street show, eating, or money-counting spots. Overtime, I got to learn that many of the street dancers I hung out with did not finish high school, and some of them didn’t even have papers. For these reasons, they struggled finding formal employment and housing. I hosted street dancers who needed an emergency place to sleep at night and I lived for a few months with two street show colleagues in my 20 square-metre studio in Crimée. All in all, founding an official organisation is not an option for most hip-hop street dancers in Paris, moreover, the time and place restrictions associated with the permits wouldn’t necessarily match with the best slots to perform for tourists.

The first time I experienced one of our shows being stopped, I felt defeated. Indeed, it was difficult to understand why we would be dispersed abruptly in the middle of our performance. Why wouldn’t the police let us finish, at least? I understood then that, despite the popularity of hip-hop and our shows, hip-hop dance performances and certain dancing bodies were not welcomed everywhere. Our capitalist state responds to performative acts in public spaces with hyper policing which reasserts the limited use of public spaces imposed on certain bodies, and especially black bodies. André Lepecki addresses these kinds of limitations on the body in “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: Or, the task of the dancer.” In his article, choreopolitics is the term he coins referring to choreographing protest, which is the ultimate political task of the dancer. Choreopolitics is the embodied demand to move freely in response to choreopolicing, which he defines as “the way in which the police determine the space of circulation for protesters and ensures that everyone is in their permissible place ” Choreopolicing is implemented in order to “de-mobilize political action by means of implementing a certain kind of movement that prevent any formation and expression of the political” (Lepecki).

Another implication of our shows being cut short was the fact that we couldn’t ask our audience to tip us at the end of the performance. For me, as an undergraduate student, street dancing was primarily my way of learning about hip-hop culture and making pocket money to support my studies. But for my fellow crew members, street dancing was their full-time job, their bread and butter and lifestyle. For many practitioners of colour, remaining unseen and dancing away from institutional/formal spaces is sometimes a question of freedom vs. jail; my crew members knew the dangers of performing in public but they would rather take the risk of being fined, arrested, or jeopardising their immigration status than stop dancing hip-hop in the street.

What surprised me the most was my crew members’ reaction to the show being cancelled by the police; after only a few minutes, they were ready to restart the performance. This was an “aha” moment for me because I saw how hip-hop dancers had the power to reclaim their cultural expression and transform Western institutional spaces. In a way, they defied the spatial, legislative, and cultural restrictions imposed on their moving bodies by doing hip-hop where hip-hop wasn’t technically meant to be. This relationship between institutional space and the resistive power of movement is something hip-hop dance scholar Naomi Bragin discusses in her PhD thesis “Black Power of Hip Hop Dance: On Kinesthetic Politics,” which looks at the significance of dance improvisation in the black radical tradition. Her chapter “Shot and Captured: Turf Dance, YAK Films, and The Oakland, California, R.I.P Project” shows how turf dancers occupy the policed and busy streets of Oakland. Bragin argues that the dancers convey a political message through their collective improvisation and exposure of their black bodies to passers-by, police officers, and the critical audience on the internet. Their works show how, despite the restrictions imposed by society, performances can be political acts as dancers move in controlled spaces. The reflection of my experience with my crew members follows Bragin’s lead in examining how hip-hop dancers reinvent institutional and restrictive spaces and practice freedom of expression.

Through these experiences, I started to recognise my privilege as a French citizen who was enrolled in a higher education institution compared to the different level of risk my crew members were taking when performing hip-hop. This insider/outsider reality is something that was even more exacerbated when I became a scholar and a matter I keep reflecting on in my journey in hip-hop.