Fashioning the Hip-Hop Dancing Body: An Actor-Network Theory Approach to “Fresh” Performance Practice

This thesis examines how hip-hop dance performance, which increasingly moves into digital and site-specific contexts, is constituted through the material movements of, and connections between, bodies, clothing, and space. The research proposes a new materialist framework and highlights, through the concepts of assemblage and distributed agency, the constitutive entanglement between human and non-human agencies in live and digitalised hip-hop performance. Actor-network theory (ANT) is engaged as the main conceptual approach to explore the agential capacity of the fashioned, hip-hop dancing body to transform and be transformed by other material actors (actants) in multiple networks of relationships. ANT’s core principle of “tracing associations” is used not only to map relationships between human and non-human actors, but also to connect hip-hop to other academic fields – sociology, contemporary dance, performance, costume, and fashion. Fashion is approached as an ambiguous term in relation to hiphop; the complex fashion/ costume distinction is challenged through ANT’s concepts of translation and multiplicity.

The analysis of three hip-hop dance pieces – The Locksmiths Liiive, Our Bodies Back, and The Purple Jigsaw – reveals the multi-layered and multidirectional realities of contemporary hip-hop practitioners and the histories and concepts that inform those realities. For example, the term “fresh” – a critical material semiotic concept and trope embedded in hip-hop culture that encapsulates creativity, confidence, aspiration, success, and respect – is examined from the perspectives generated by interviewees and observed knowledge of material data gathered via ethnographic research methods. Fashion, through its entanglement with the hip-hop dancing body, is reframed as a mechanism of change that becomes powerful through its spatial and temporal displacement. The hip-hop performer is reconceptualised as a dynamic, material bodily assemblage with the capacity to cut through fixed dichotomies that have shaped hip-hop since its emergence in the mid-1970s; most notably the underground/ professional, live/ mediated, and masculine/ feminine dichotomies.