For the past five decades, hip-hop dance and culture have grown from their Bronx-based birthplace into a global cultural force. In recent years, practitioner-scholars have increasingly centered the histories and lived experiences of hip-hop dance practitioners. For this Dance Historian Is In, dance studies scholar MiRi Park examines the contributions of B-Girl Asia One and B-Boy Cros One to building the cultural infrastructure that allowed both U.S. and international breaking scenes to flourish. Through their events they each produced and created, B-Boy Summit and Freestyle Session, the two dance artists established vital platforms for community formation, artistic exchange, and transnational circulation. Both B-Girl Asia One and B-Boy Cros One were interviewed as part of the street dance series of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division’s Street Dance Oral History Project and excerpts from their oral histories will be featured in this presentation.

MiRi Park is an award-winning lecturer at Cal State Channel Islands where she teaches hip-hop dance, dance history and culture, and research methods. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Culture and Performance at UCLA and her research focuses on theories that emerge from the cypher, neoliberalism, and Asian American identities in hip hop dance. Park’s scholarly work on oral history and hip-hop dance is published in the Oxford Handbook on Hip Hop Dance Studies, Dance Research Methodologies: Ethics, Orientations, and Practices (Routledge), and Dance Research Journal.

For more than 10 years, The Dance Historian Is In at the Library for the Performing Arts has highlighted a diverse range of dancers and choreographers across history. This series began when archivist and historian David Vaughan started volunteering at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division. Vaughan began a monthly program showing his favorite dance films from the Division's extensive collection, through which he unearthed many treasures, and helped acquire even more. Vaughan continued the series until the end of his life. Today, we honor his memory and work by inviting dance historians from all over the world each month to carry on the tradition of highlighting dance history through the Dance Division's moving image collection.