Felicia McCarren's new book, French Moves: The Cultural Politics of le hip hop, offers an original perspective on contemporary hip-hop theater. McCarren begins with the suggestion that hip-hop provides an escape from one's family and cultural background. Hip-hop is rarely spoken about in this way, and yet her evidence points to such a possibility after a ten-year research project in France. She argues that hip-hop is simultaneously about inclusion and rage. Hip-hop not only addresses social problems in France, in accordance with dance's civic status, but also offers an outlet for the expression of rage about the inequalities faced by minority youth. McCarren writes: “While French hip hop values inclusiveness, hip hoppers have themselves been excluded” (xiv).

The majority of scholarship about hip-hop dance theater focuses on addressing the works of American (Chang Reference Chang2009; Davis Reference Davis and Chang2006) and French artists (Kauffmann Reference Kauffmann2004; Shapiro Reference Shapiro2003, Reference Shapiro2004). The American scholarship has tended to be more concerned with defining the genre of hip-hop theater and canonizing the important artists. The French scholarship has focused on sociological perspectives, considering how aesthetics are informed by institutionalization. As an American researching in France, McCarren relies on her collaborations with French sociologists to situate her canonizing of French hip-hop theater artists. Hip-hop theater is a genre that mixes hip-hop aesthetics with theatrical conventions, and, as McCarren points out, France has produced some of the best choreographers working in this genre to date.

On the one hand, “hip-hop theater” is a self-definition given by artists themselves who want to account for their roots in hip-hop culture and their commitment to the form. On the other hand, hip-hop theater is recognized as a marketing tool, used to encourage new theater audiences. In Eisa Davis's (Reference Davis and Chang2006) account of the emergence of the genre, there is an offer of broad eclecticism, with interludes of albums, clips from narrative films, and festival circuits, all of which are considered to be contributing forces in the development of the form. If Davis's list includes dance companies such as Ghettoriginal, Full Circle, and the work of Jonzi D, Roberta Uno (Reference Uno and Chang2006) adds the iconic Philadelphia-based Rennie Harris. This growing canon of important artists is complicated by the earliest accounts of breaking as a cultural practice within hip-hop culture.

In 1981, Sally Banes suggested that breaking in New York City began as a folk form, and a game played by boys to assert their individual identities and local ties to friends (Banes 1994). She suggests that the form eventually became theatrical as it started to draw attention from outsiders. Jonzi D, artistic director of Breakin’ Convention, the largest hip-hop theater festival in the world, argues that hip-hop theater has in fact always had theatrical components and is the contemporary dance of our time. Early examples of hip-hop theater as a hybrid form performed on the proscenium stage include Mr. Wiggles and PopMaster Fabel's work with Ann Marie DeAngelo, the artistic director of Ballet de Monterrey in Mexico (Fogarty Reference Fogarty2012). Building on this, Ghettoriginal produced the first hip-hop musicals, including the 1995 cult classic “Jam on the Groove,” which toured to France (Fogarty Reference Fogarty2012). However, the term “hip-hop theater” did not arise until the late 1990s and early 2000s to account for the work of particular artists (Davis Reference Davis and Chang2006).

In French Moves, Felicia McCarren expands the coverage to include some of the most exciting hip-hop dance choreographers and performers working in France today. She discusses Franck II Louise's Drop It!, one of the strongest examples of hip-hop ballet internationally, alongside the abstractions offered by Compagnie Choream's Epsilon. Yiphum Chiem's Apsara is another work that is analyzed in relation to Hélène Cixous's L'histoire terrible mais inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk, Roi du Cambodge. Both are works by women that are political, and engage with the Cambodian genocide. They stage an interrogation of the embodied politics involved in remembering a tradition of dance that has encountered annihilation. McCarren shares with us the context through which the dancers of the “Cambodian Royal Ballet were among the targeted victims of the Khmer Rouge exterminations,” with ninety percent of the company killed. Through this history of erasure, contemporary artists of interest to McCarren link an erased past with a spectacular present, found in a hip-hop vocabulary created by young boys but reappropriated by young women. Her reading of gender relies on two categories: feminine and masculine. To be aggressive and macho reads masculine, as opposed to traditional female Cambodian dances representing a Goddess figure.Footnote ¹ She suggests that hip-hop becomes an escape from a cultural past for women artists and practitioners.

Festival event organizers have also played a significant role in defining the hip-hop genre. Uno (Reference Uno and Chang2006) discusses how American hip-hop theater festivals are intended to curate and cultivate hip-hop theater through their programming. McCarren demonstrates the tensions between two major hip-hop festivals in France that have competing visions about both the authenticity and the future of the genre. Of her own subject position, she suggests that as an American scholar studying French hip-hop, she had particular advantages in gaining access to the community. Performers saw her both as a dancer and also as an American. She suggests that the French hip-hoppers made her feel as though hip-hop somehow belonged to her, even as she reveals her lack of knowledge about the American hip-hop dance scene. This becomes clear at times in her comparisons between American hip-hop and French “hip-hoppers.” Yet, this lack of understanding, and her self-reflexivity about the gaps in her knowledge as a researcher, both contribute to the work in meaningful ways.

We see American hip-hop through the eyes of the French dancers, read as an exotic form that represents both their “otherness” to American culture and their experience of “otherness” in French society. McCarren argues that this “otherness” is tied up with practitioners’ desire to belong in French culture: to find a voice as citizens who struggle politically, economically, and artistically.

McCarren's work is unique in its integration of political theory and interpretative criticism of specific artistic works. This is an interesting complement to the pioneering work of French sociologist Roberta Shapiro. According to Shapiro (Reference Shapiro2004), the growth of world class French hip-hop dance theatrical productions was the result of a small group of collaborators, involving educators, choreographers, and social workers, who built the relationship between theaters and street dancers. Their involvement led to the formation of “associations”—a shift from competing crews to collective casts that were shaped by institutionalization.

As Isabelle Kauffmann (Reference Kauffmann2004) argues, hip hop dances in France started in nightclubs, and there is tension for participants between their aesthetic practices performed among peers in battles and cyphers and the performance practices and criteria of evaluation offered by the theater world. Bazin (Reference Bazin and Durand2002), also a French writer, suggests that French hip-hoppers gain a “double legitimacy” through their ability to transgress both the theater world and its criteria, and the localized aesthetic tastes of their peer groups of artists working in the hip-hop medium in battles competed offstage.

More so than her French peers, McCarren is interested to address how French hip-hop is about the “the poetic figures that choreography permits: allowing bodies to refer to something else, to become other than they are” (11). She wants to discuss the specific works that have moved her with their political or technological themes, and situate these pieces in contemporary theories.

Alongside her analysis of individual works, McCarren also includes a section that pragmatically addresses hip-hop pedagogy. Here she focuses on how hip-hop artists teach in the classroom. This section provides thick description, and the music becomes an active participant in the narrative. McCarren's value judgments and tastes as a student in the classroom are foregrounded. She writes: “In the studio format, the class does not leave much time for internal reflection or self-expression: the rhythm is aggressive…. The course depends on sequences repeatedly performed before the mirror, with loud music (154).” Comparing this to Stéphanie Nataf's teaching approach, McCarren suggests that:

In the above quotes, McCarren reveals her pleasure in the familiar codes of the theater world.

The crux of McCarren's book lies in her integration of semiotics and cultural theory with a strong analysis of French hip-hoppers. Her fascination with the artists and their conscious grappling with issues of technology, citizenship, and gender creates the basis for what is, by and large, an approach built on her previous theorizations in Dancing Machines: Choreographies of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (2003). Joseph Schloss (Reference Schloss2009) questions discussions of breaking centered on theoretical abstraction such as this, preferring an approach that gives voice to the participants' own explanations of what they are doing. However, McCarren's work is rooted in an awareness of the positions taken by French hip-hoppers. What she does not do is speak for the participants; her reading of their performances is clearly her own. Thus, McCarren has complicated the discussion about hip-hop dance by providing no easy answers. Instead she stops to ask what is at stake for all of us when the body's meanings are treated seriously as the political messages that they are capable of becoming.