The Ohio State Department of Dance offers much more to the student population than the opportunity to watch a few performances throughout the year.
An entire electives program exists to offers students the chance to dance. Just recently – within the past ten years – the department has created hip-hop dance classes, because of the overwhelming demand by the overall student population.
“The classes are relatively new in our curriculum,” said Scott Marsh, department of dance chair. “They were added in response to this new form of dance present in popular culture.”
When the classes first started, demand for the classes exceeded the number of dance instructors. But now the department is training more graduate students to teach the classes.
“The program has been growing tremendously over the past few years due in large part to a few graduate students who just graduated,” said Scott Lowe, a masters of fine arts candidate in dance, who is teaching three of the hip-hop classes this quarter.
Lowe started dancing four years ago as an undergraduate student at Stanford University. He then began to branch out into other dance forms such as modern and performing with hip-hop groups.
“I generally start with a warm-up routine that we do at the beginning of every class, so that the students will always have something familiar to get comfortable with no matter how challenging the rest of the class is,” he said.
“The rest of the class is divided between short movement combinations across the floor, and learning choreographed routines and performing them. I try to format the class so that at the end of the quarter the class has an actual dance piece that we can perform at the department’s informal performance,” Lowe said.
Lowe’s classes are very funk-oriented, a style he learned while dancing on the West Coast – the style that is most often seen on television. Other teachers have different styles of their own, and each teacher is clear with the students at the beginning of each quarter so they can get what they want from each class.
“The hip-hop classes are usually filled to capacity, around 40 students per class, but there is sometimes more room in early morning classes,” Lowe said. “There is often a lengthy waitlist for hip-hop classes.”
“We are really pleased that there is so much interest in this dance form,” Marsh said. “And we hope that the students will start with hip hop and then become interested in our other classes such as West African dance, modern and even ballet.”
Ballet and modern classes are offered every quarter, while West African and other classes such as jazz and tap are offered more sporadically.
Because hip hop classes themselves have become so popular, the department has just started to offer both beginner and advanced hip hop classes. The dancers in the classes range from people who have never danced, to street dancers, to dance majors who just want to supplement their own studies. The beginner classes encompass such a wide range of dancers that the advanced classes, which are listed in the course offerings as Dance 601H08 Supplimental Studies, are geared towards students that have danced before and will move at a more rapid pace.
