Throughout my training, I have been finding and hearing about great man teachers. But what about them? Godlive in her text Dance as Hard as a man: How female hip hop dancers have had to man up to try to get a place in hip hop scene and Ariyan in her text Dancing Goddesses: African American Women Hip Hop Dancers - Cultural Contributors reflect how the scene has been plagued by patriarchal dynamics from its beginnings and are still present today. Why do we know little about the women

who have contributed to the expansion of this movement in Argentina? Why does the “correct” way to dance in competitions generally correspond to masculinised stereotypes? How is the inequality in battles and wins so unbalanced? Why are event and training staff mostly comprised of men when there are so many women within the community who have the knowledge to contribute?

Little by little things are changing but in many more conservative spaces these practices continue - even amongst colleagues. The patriarchal dynamics do not only occur from men to women, but it does not distinguish between genders - there is a collective learning that we have to transit. Through the difficulties that were present in my career and that of colleagues, I began to see that there was a lot of this in the system, but there was also a lot to change in myself and my environment. It's time to look inward, see how much of what we learned was right and rearm ourselves with courage, confidence, and self-esteem. We need to put attention on the idea that if we don´t know them is different than they didn't exist. We need to break with the pattern of silence and symbolic violence that represents when women who have been part of and are part of the path are not mentioned.

 

I began to want to know more about the history of street dance women in my country, to know about those who wrote part of the history and those who are just beginning, to observe them move, to know their fears and their lights, to talk about what ideas they have and had. What experiences have they had throughout their lives, those who have stopped dancing due to sexist violence, those who have been able to break in? What moves them? It is necessary to recover the sisterhood and connect with our ancestry to heal the wounds of before, of now, and those that will come.

 

These discomforts and constant transformations through the years led me to create Hip H.A.P. The name of this initiative is a play on words: from the Anglo-Saxon etymology, "hip" to know and "hop" movement, as a compound word “conscious movement”. The three axes that we develop and promote internally are from the practice of hip hop dance itself: we are Human, Artist, and Professional beings. It’s a space for women and dissidents to meet, recognise, debate, and empower ourselves together through the tools provided by the study of hip-hop culture and related dances.

 

It began in the middle of the pandemic in an online program for the exchange of experiences, then it was transformed into a face-to-face experience of transformation and this year 2023 the research stage on women in street dance with a federal perspective will begin. There are many women who are part of hip hop and leave their seed in various ways and whom I admire and respect. Some of them: Romina Bianchini in the cultural manager job, Gaby Pardo, Miriam Paez, Bgirl Marce, Bgirl Roxana, Lu Greco, Anita Pirosanto, Campanita, Mica Elah, Nenas Crew, Super Powerful Crew in Buenos Aires, Daisy Miscieli in Mendoza, Vane Herbas in San Luis, Luchi Araa in Salta, Bgirl Natural, Magui Rabal, Bgirl Merchu, Maru Aieta, Nanika, Lu Vuelo, Bgirl Abril, Lour Franco, Lula Giachero, Balu 280, Selene, Male Mendoza, Camila Gorrini, Ailin Suarez, Bgirl Nanu, Bgirl Rachu, Bgirl Dao, all the women who have been present in these first editions, Maxi Vega, Mara Sanfiz, Vicky Branda, Ani Diarte, Vani Gual, Valen Uffelman, Luchi Alvarenga, Mili Lucila Camila Otazu, Dian Cisneros, Lucila Unu, Marina Paterno, Mica Kordy, Mica Prieto, Meli Fernandez, Agus Giova, Rochi One, Vibes, Belu, Johi Stumpo, Aichu One, Olivia, Mili Perez Cabral, Brisa, Lau Cardozo, Sabri and Emi Roizen, Beli Rotela with whom I had the honour of sharing, knowing them and giving life to this project. And many others that I am surely missing to mention and we will get to know throughout the investigation of Hip H.A.P. All of them have contributed in diverse and very different ways a seed for the community, with different times, realities and perspectives.

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Being able to build from territorial diversity and an intergenerational perspective will allow us to learn more about their and our stories. If we want to know them we must go in search of them.

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It has been a unique and transforming space. The energy, the safe and comfortable environment. Respect and mutual love. It brought me a new perspective on myself and my art. It's crazy, it changes you and it's worth it, do it. That it is only for women makes it even more incredible. Agus Giova

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It is the best way to get into hip hop, its culture and the vibe that people inspire in you. A space for knowing each other and others. Sofi Zeinfeld

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What I liked the most was listening to women take the voice, encouraging me to tell something about myself and feeling heard and accompanied. It is a circle of security, investigation, introspection, groupness. It contributed my way of connecting with people and with myself (and my ideas). Juli Campos

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Community, empathy, support, sharing, love, containment, equality, awareness, information, hug, different and equal experiences, it helped me to exchange experiences, to be aware that we all go through the same things and there is no reason to go through it alone. You never know when you might be helping and inspiring someone else. All the beautiful and powerful women who made it up. Real. See the unique beauty in each one. I liked the exchange, meeting people, being able to chat with people I had found but had never given themselves the opportunity. very happy that you will be inspired and nourished a lot, recharge your strength. Rochi One

 

Hip Hop culture and the various dances that surround it have their genesis in artivism. It started as a social transformation tool whose first focus was to raise the voice of minorities. We seek to recover and promote the use of this practice as the tool for social transformation that it was, promoting artivism as another possibility of self-knowledge. Is this phrase the same for men as it is for women and dissidents? To our surprise, the answer is no.

 

We live in a patriarchal culture that stains all its areas with these ways of being, doing and counting. How do we feel about it? How much do we know about our power? What can we create together in spaces for dialogue and transformation? In a capitalist, patriarchal, racist and xenophobic world we need to rethink how each base of each idea is built. Is it ours or have we learned it? Part of this learning requires the reconstruction of our biography, allowing us to look to the side and see ourselves as equals, generating support networks being aware that beyond the various life experiences there is something that crosses us equally and it is the system, we will be able to empathise and rebuild our ways of connecting with ourselves and with others, see how many network and community values we have learned and how we can begin to build them.

 

To be valued and deserving, we do not need to be a benchmark for something, nor have the endorsement of any more experienced man. We need to encourage ourselves to build our own journeys from the values that identify us and connect us with our partners: love, empathy, making friends with vulnerability, letting our essence be the protagonist of our movement and gradually deconstructing the masculine moulds of “as it should look”. Open spaces for dialogue and debate where ideas from opposite poles can debate and face each other through argument and analysis, nullifying violence as a sinequanon part of differences and where all bodies are part of the history of the movement. Hip H.A.P. It is just beginning, and it is a proposal of thousands to continue contributing to break stereotypes and to be able to reach deeper and deeper to find ourselves in a mirror to our companions. It is important to keep in mind the ethnic, geographical and intergenerational diversity. Each one of them adds value and particularity to the identity of each person and their history, which contributes to social history and therefore to the practice of dance.

 

This project begins in Buenos Aires because I currently live here, but it aims to meet and connect with women from all over the country. What story did we learn from ourselves? What spaces can we inhabit from care, love and empathy? What dialogues do we begin to establish to recover our voice and the power of our body to tell the recorded stories? And what are those stories? What do we have to tell and in what ways? How can we re-signify individual and collective histories through dialogue, understand that my reality is mirrored in that of my colleagues under a system of power struggle that considers us a product for sale and thus our dance, alienating it from its expressive and political being? A great inspiration in this construction is the anthropologist Rita Segato, an Argentine author exiled in Brazil. 

 

I invite us to get to know each other, to recognise each other, to continue weaving networks of listening, dialogue, movement, and research. Without the search to sustain ideas, but to disarm and rebuild them in the form of more questions as a result of a sharing of diverse realities, of encounters and disagreements, of turning to see past history and looking forward in a responsible way before history that we want to build, remembering that our individual needs are also collective and that from that place we can work together for their transformation and improvement.

 

Rethinking the stories we want to tell our future generations

Shall we write it together?

An invitation to meet, dance and flourish.