Name:Chantal Carrillo

School/Affiliation:McMaster University

Co-Authors:Susan Marsh-Rollo, Laurel Trainor

Virtual or In-person:In-person

Abstract:

Hip hop dance competitions are an important and exciting aspect of hip hop culture, but despite their rise in popularity, there is a lack of standardized judging criteria, and it remains unclear which aspects of performance, such as synchrony, are most important. Given the aesthetic preference for synchrony in other styles of dance, we aimed to investigate whether the winner of a hip hop competition could be predicted by the synchrony between the dancers alone. We hosted an in-person hip hop competition in the LIVELab in which six competing groups, each with five dancers, performed their routines while we collected motion capture data of their movements. Five experienced judges scored each group’s dance routine on choreography, execution, and overall cohesion. 75 audience members participated simultaneously by scoring each dance routine on a scale of 1-10. Results showed that the most synchronized routine aligned with the audience’s highest scoring routine but not the judges’ highest scoring routine, and Spearman’s rank correlations were higher between audience scores and synchrony (ρ = .83) compared to between judges scores and synchrony (ρ = .66). The judges were highly consistent in their scoring, with an intra-class correlation coefficient of 0.94. Audience members with hip hop dance training were significantly more likely to correctly predict the winning group compared to those without hip hop training. The results of this study emphasize the importance of synchrony in hip hop competition, but suggest the expertise of the judges allowed them to incorporate more than synchrony in their assessment.