Choreographic Exploration of Misappropriation in Hip Hop Dance

To examine the properties that comprise hip-hop dance, a choreographic work will be shown that aims to intentionally misappropriate traditional hip hop vocabulary and philosophies. Drawing from post-modern ideologies such as repetition, accumulation, improvisation for choreography, and chance procedure, the work will scrutinize movements classified as hip-hop alongside contemporary dance material. Spurred by the popularity of Ian Eastwood’s dance videos, this work will embody similar movements and visual expressions portrayed in Eastwood’s films. Although Eastwood’s choreography seemingly exemplifies the hip-hop aesthetic, a large majority of the way Eastwood presents his work misaligns contextually with hip-hop ideologies. However, because of his embodiment of the ‘cool’ aesthetic, the use of hip-hop music, and some traditional hip-hop vocabulary, the content of his work is not questioned in terms of authenticity. If this post-modern depiction employs the same tactics as Eastwood, will the work be considered hip-hop? Consequently, viewers are asked to question what exactly qualifies hip-hop… is it the content? Or context? If a dance is set to hip-hop music and implements traditional hip-hop movements but is contextually out of the hip-hop culture, is it really hip-hop? Through this analysis, perhaps we can begin to recognize cases of misappropriation not only in hip-hop, but also in various cultural expressions

Global COVID-19 lockdown highlights humans as both threats and custodians of the environment

The global lockdown to mitigate COVID-19 pandemic health risks has altered human interactions with nature. Here, we report immediate impacts of changes in human activities on wildlife and environmental threats during the early lockdown months of 2020, based on 877 qualitative reports and 332 quantitative assessments from 89 different studies. Hundreds of reports of unusual species observations from around the world suggest that animals quickly responded to the reductions in human presence. However, negative effects of lockdown on conservation also emerged, as confinement resulted in some park officials being unable to perform conservation, restoration and enforcement tasks, resulting in local increases in illegal activities such as hunting. Overall, there is a complex mixture of positive and negative effects of the pandemic lockdown on nature, all of which have the potential to lead to cascading responses which in turn impact wildlife and nature conservation. While the net effect of the lockdown will need to be assessed over years as data becomes available and persistent effects emerge, immediate responses were detected across the world. Thus initial qualitative and quantitative data arising from this serendipitous global quasi-experimental perturbation highlights the dual role that humans play in threatening and protecting species and ecosystems. Pathways to favorably tilt this delicate balance include reducing impacts and increasing conservation effectiveness