“Master the way it feels”—to feel

Street dance is known for being an improvisation-based art form. During freestyle, dancers are expected to dance spontaneously to the music they may or may not have heard before. Because of this, freestyle is often an anxiety-inducing experience, as one must face the uncertainty of the flow of bodily movements in the very moment of performance, without a schema for the routines to follow, and without guarantees about the aesthetic qualities one evokes in front of the audience. At the same time, freestyle is alluring because its ritualized atmosphere, in which the DJ (music keeper), the MC (the host), hyped audience, competitive dancers, booming sound system, and lightning collectively generate the vibrancy of the scene, often energizes dancers and enables unexpected bodily potentials to emerge beyond the everyday rehearsals in the studio or at home.

In this context of unpredictability, “feeling” often becomes the center of cultivation. As Mike puts it, “You have to try to master the way it feels.” “To feel” is a verbum sentiendi that street dancers always say: “Feel yourself, feel the movement, feel the music” to transmit sensory-affective capacities. Verbs of perception, such as “to feel,” are crucial because their metapragmatic formulations help practitioners better identify what could have been experienced and manifested. In this sense, “feeling” does not simply correspond to catalogable emotional terms such as fear, sorrow, or anger. Rather, it names the capacity to recognize and enact the experiential moment through which movements are registered as meaningful by both the dancer and the audience. In actor training, for example, students do not learn propositional content that can be falsified or contradicted, but rather learn to do qualia and to become the “medium” (Lemon Reference Lemon2013). Mike has emphasized “feeling” through a comparison: “what dancers train is not just how the movement is done, because one can do moves really well but ‘feel’ nothing.” According to him,

As two sides of the same coin, “look” and “feel” coincide as movement-feeling unfolding through dancers’ bodies, dependent on their historically ratified intrasubjective and intersubjective meanings, which I reframe as the qualia of spontaneity in semiotic terms.

Qualia of spontaneity are trained to register without becoming obtrusive. “This is a sign of uncertainty,” as one instructor commented while correcting a student’s arm position after watching her locking freestyle, pointing to the qualic sign that should have remained out of sight, followed by his demonstration of the conventional ways of doing this pointing move (fieldnote, 2025). Comparatively, when I attempted to perform a House dance step to a polyrhythm rather than the eight count to align with sound variations in music, Mike said to me after I told him my attempt, “I didn’t see it. You need to emphasize what you are doing.” He then reworked my movements by amplifying their spatial range to highlight the variations in the music (fieldnote, 2026). Moreover, small bodily gestures can significantly transform the movement-feelings. “Raise your head!” Mike exclaimed while squatting down to make eye contact with me as I looked down at the floor during a House freestyle. Afterward, demonstrating them but with his head up, he shared, “I can tell you may not feel confident when you do it, but it doesn’t matter that much. When you raise your head, your dance can look more confident (fieldnote, 2026).” Qualia of spontaneity, thus, hinge on the body’s capacity to manage movement-feeling—bodily signs constituted through processes of socialization, including learning routine/choreography, drilling movements, and rehearsing improvisation (what practitioners call “session”, a low-stakes environment for dance experimentation). In one class, for example, we were tasked with drilling the same move at its maximum spatial reach to a 5-minute song nonstop until our bodies are completely depleted (fieldnote, 2026). As the instructor explained, “Training is to get to the body positions that make you feel uncomfortable. Discomfort is what the training is about—to get comfortable in dance.”

Therefore, “feeling” becomes anticipatory insofar as its pattern becomes registered as meaningful through dancers’ repetitions of the movement-feeling. In freestyle, then, even when moves are not meant to be preplanned before their enactment, dancers know the “feelings” to (un)anticipate the uncertainty of the flow of the body.

“You are going to have that kind of relation”—to relate

As “relation” often becomes a catchword, its ubiquity can precede its potential. Similar to “feeling,” “relation” operates as a unit of dance pedagogy through which the relationship between bodily movements and imagination is attuned to and cultivated. In this dance community, “relation” is both discerned as movement-feeling and deployed as a word to transmit the sensibility of freestyle. To illustrate this, I draw on an ethnographic vignette from my house dance battle training program, where we meet twice a week, and the curriculum is designed around freestyle in the battle settings. On Tuesday nights, the class leans toward learning dance steps. We are often tested with speaking out loud the name of the footwork being taught in addition to demonstrating its repertoire to the teachers, who emphasize not only the pattern of the steps but also the pioneers that create them. We drilled the dance steps by repetition, getting used to how they “feel,” until they can be done without the attentive manipulation of the body required for their execution. Meanwhile, we try out changes along the way, both between movements and musical variations and transitions. On Saturdays, those same steps become the material for experimenting with how to put them, along with other moves that we have acquired, into freestyle.

Pas de Bourree is one such foundational dance step in house dance that we practice. We first learned this pattern on a Tuesday, drilling it until it became familiar. By that Saturday, we practiced to let it show up in freestyle—not as a technique but as a “relation.” The move is originally the name of a ballet move, but has been taken up and reworked by house dancers in the clubs. The trajectory of this movement goes: left foot steps in a diagonal to the left side, right foot crosses behind the left foot, and left foot steps next to the right foot, before switching to the other side.

As Mike, our house dance teacher, talks about “relation,” this word begins to take on indexical significances in the dance room. He starts simply: “When you are dancing to house music, it’s your time to ‘relate.’” Here, the pedagogical task is not to learn to categorize the relationship, but to embody it through a reflexive understanding of it. Or, in Mike’s words, for “That” to happen. To make the relationship meaningful, Mike shifts us into another time and place: a club scene, with a DJ and club-goers moving together to house music on a weekend night. To note here, house dance style originated from the nightclubs and did not start as a distinctive dance genre in the beginning. It becomes a dance genre as it accumulates recognizable dance steps and also borrows moves from other dance genres. House dance relies heavily on lower body movement, especially footwork and “lofting.” The culture emerged alongside the rise of House music in New York and Chicago’s underground nightclubs during the 1970s, and Mike identifies as being socialized into the East Coast scene in the 1990s and early 2000s.

In his represented speech, he brought us to what club-goers experience after a week: “I felt this this week … I went through this this week.” The omission of specificity of the referent through the use of “this” not only gestures toward the indeterminancy and the potential multiplicity of experiences, but also affirms the validity of having some experience, whatever it may be, as one moves through everyday life and brings such experience to the dance floor. Yet, while participants arrive at the club with experiences, to show us what “relation” constitutes, he clarifies what “relating” is not: it is not about executing a move “you know how to do.”

To show us the differences, Mike throws his arms into the air and flaps them around. This movement is commonly seen among music fans at livehouses or concerts, hands flapping or waving while vibing to the music played on the stage. Among dancers, however, such a gesture is often stereotypically associated with the “non-dancer” type, because of its prevalence and replicability in the public eye. It often indexes a form of bodily attunement that is considered too accessible to count as a dancing quality. “That don’t happen because you know how to do like this,” the flapping club move Mike impersonates, thus becomes iconic and indexical of “not relating” in this context. This gesture immediately provokes laughter in the class, yet the idea lands.

Mike then shows us what “relating” looks like. He begins spreading his arms, spinning, and singing with exuberant joy. “That,” he tells us, “is what house has to be first.” In his spinning body, “relation” ceases to be an abstract and becomes visible as an affective moment: losing yourself, letting the feelings move you.

At the same time, “relation” does not stop at an ecstatic state, as Mike just demonstrated through spinning. “Relating,” he continues to say, means dancing to the music: its lyrics and its beat. He begins with the pas de bourrée that we have just been drilling. But now, “It’s no longer just that,” he says. The same footwork keeps going, but his body changes: he turns, circles, walks forward with twist walk steps, and goes in the right direction of where he just stood. When the lyrics arrive: “It’s too hot here, it’s too hot,” from the famous Hip Hop song “Hot In Herre,” which he sings as he dances, he starts hopping backward with the same footwork, as if retreating from the heat. The footsteps of pas de bourrée have not changed, but its “relation” did.

Through “relation,” pas de bourrée becomes more than a movement technique. “Freestyle” is therefore how “relation” enters and is shown in and through the body, where a dancer does not just “do” a step, but relates to sound, lyrics, and beats through shifting energy.

“That is what you are sharing,” Mike periodically ends his teaching session before we turn to another round of drilling, practicing the “relation” he just demonstrated through our bodies. In linguistic anthropology, “that” is conceptually understood as a deictic and a shifter, which has no context-independent lexical meaning because its referential value always depends on the pragmatic presuppositions (Silverstein Reference Silverstein, Basso and Selby1976). Deictics such as “I,” “you,” “this,” “that,” “here,” “there,” “yesterday,” and “tomorrow” are all shifters, whose meaning can only be inferred in terms of the speaker’s position in a particular place, time, and social context in the speech event (Agha Reference Agha2007; Urciuoli Reference Urciuoli2008). The indeterminancy of “that” shifts multiple referents during Mike’s teaching, yet accumulates indexical meaning as the pedagogy unfolds, constructing what “relation” is and how it could happen in the students’ dancing bodies.

I argue that “That” also works as a qualic sign, in addition to being understood conceptually as a deictic and a shifter whose usage indexes the speaker-hearer identity and value alignment (Urciuoli Reference Urciuoli2025). Their deployment not only establishes emerging agreement of what the “object” refers to, but also indexes affective qualities of dance that are continually built upon, but not limited to, its denotation or its immediate referential framework. Moreover, these qualic-deictic operate in ways that are similar to, but not the same as, adjectives, nominalized adjectives, or nouns, which conventionally characterize qualia as a socially valuable quality of objects. When we become preoccupied with particular terms and elevate them as the essence of a bodily practice such as dance, we can risk mistaking fragments of discourse for the lived experiences manifested in practice itself. Qualic-deictic, such as “That,” index sensorial qualities that cannot be recovered simply by looking at isolated linguistic forms that are produced by the speakers or analytically assigned by researchers. They need to be approached through their co-occurrence with other signs through which “relations” are communicated.

At the same time, “relations” must also be recognized and validated by others. So far, I have focused on moments in which “feelings” and “relations” are referred to and invoked pedagogically. In the following sections, I return to Mike’s comment in line 45: “the judges want to see who is more genuine,” right after teaching “relations”—to specifically explore the dimensions of evaluation in street dance culture: dance battle.

“When judges actually judge …”—to judge

“Right. Here’s the question. Would you be judging that battle, or would you be watching that battle?” Returning to the student’s earlier concern about the weight of technique and freedom in dance, which I introduced at the beginning of this paper, Mike responded to him with a question. “I’d be watching it. That’s why.” The student replied. “The judge has a job to do, you see. They’re not hired to give their opinion about dance. They’re hired to judge your understanding of the style. Many judges tell everybody before the battle, ‘Have fun, come here to enjoy yourself, and show me what you got.’ And then when they actually judge—‘can’t do the footwork.’ Mike continued and impersonated how a judge takes notes while watching a battle, sarcastically exaggerating what judges say but do otherwise—the difference between the rhetoric of “having fun” and the actual evaluation criteria, and the whole class laughed.

The house dance battle training that Mike has led for two years is designed not simply as a regular dance class where choreographies are taught, but as preparation for dancers to compete through freestyle. Dance battle is the most common sports-like ritual of practice in street dance, particularly the “old school” dance styles (e.g., popping, locking, breaking, hiphop, house, waacking, etc.), in addition to the club setting “cypher” or the emerging “urban dance” choreography styles. During the dance battle, dancers take turns performing freestyle in front of their opponent with music randomly played by the DJ, and after each round, there are judges selecting a winner based on their perception of the dancers’ competitiveness. The winner of each battle advances to the next round until a final champion is determined.

In the street dance world, practitioners hold different attitudes toward “standardization” of evaluative metrics in dance battles. Some refuse explicit criteria. On social media, street dancers frequently post to alert that standardized criteria will end up disciplining freedom and creativity in dance. Explicit criteria are often framed as constraints that shift dancers’ training effort “outward,” where attention to evaluation risks precedes the “inward” experience of dance. However, some call for more explicit criteria. A waacking dancer in my community here, for instance, expressed frustration with local community battles where judges appeared to base their decisions on personal friendship with the dancers or styles resembling their own rather than the competency of the performance. The absence of explicit criteria was experienced as a form of neglect: a failed recognition of the training dancers invest. From yet another position, a community leader here once argued that recognition and resources should prioritize local dancers, giving visibility and support to those who actively contribute to the community rather than to dancers who travel from other cities only to compete for prize money without investing in local relationships. Evaluation, then, becomes a means of inclusion and exclusion.

As street dance has circulated globally, evaluations of dance have gradually developed from seniority-based judgment by OGs (short for original gangsters, meaning pioneer or legend dancers) to more formalized metrics. In Olympic breakdancing, for example, dancers are evaluated according to five equally weighted criteria: technique, originality, musicality, vocabulary, and execution. These metrics draw on the lexicalization of accumulated experience of senior dancers and, in turn, become the references that new generation dancers look to develop their competency in training. Yet they are neither universally accepted nor literally followed: contestation over judging is constant.

Some mourn for the old days when judging rested with senior OGs whose credibility derived from their own battle records and the community’s collective recognition that conferred the authority upon them as judges. In this sense, being judged through dance battles has been a crucial way for young generation dancers to learn from OGs’ expertise and insights to continue to develop their dance. Still others propose evaluative criteria to redistribute authority and democratize the judging process: to make judgments more transparent and less reliant on the personal authority and charisma of OGs alone, especially in the context of the global circulations of street dance. Some large global competitions have started to experiment with alternative models of judgment. “Red Bull Dance Your Style” competition, which I attended twice in the United States, replaces judges with the audience. Every audience member is provided with an electronic wristband to vote for the candidate they believe won the round, and the results are collected through AI technology. “You Decide!” was displayed on the giant LED screen on stage at the annual global final competition held in Los Angeles in 2025 (Figure 1). Even this, however, cannot guarantee the “objectivity” of the result. The final round was contested between an 18-year-old Dutch female dancer (represented in red) and a senior South Korean female dancer (represented in blue), who had previously won the world championship in 2023. From where I stood, the numbers of red and blue wristbands appeared roughly equal, with blue perhaps even slightly outnumbering red. Yet when the MC announced the result, the young Dutch female dancer was declared the winner by a majority vote. Audience members around me started murmuring with confusion, with some exclaiming, “What?” The result subsequently generated some controversy among both in-person and online audiences, many of whom voiced support for the losing dancer. Some audience even speculated that the previous champion wasn’t awarded the champion again by the event organizers because doing so would appear to take away opportunities from new generation dancers.

Figure 1.

Red Bull Dance Your Style in LA, 2025. Source: Photograph by the author.

Figure 1 Long description

The first image shows a large stage with the text 'You Decide!' displayed prominently. The stage is decorated with palm trees and colorful lights and there are people visible in the foreground. The second image depicts a large audience in an arena, holding glowing lights, creating a vibrant atmosphere. The seating area is filled with people and the lights vary in color, adding to the energetic ambiance.

Quantification, in other words, is both desired and resisted. Contested views often begin with disagreement over the result of an apparently authoritative decision over which dancer was more “competitive,” which evokes a sense of unfairness. Contestation over judgment can then be further scaled up to become entangled with the discourse of nation-states in the globalization of street dance. In these settings, the national belonging of the judges and the demographics of audiences often become sites of disagreement, including disputes over which countries’ participants have easier access to not only quality dance training but also the capacity of national passports to obtain visas to travel abroad, and thus a greater mobility to attend international competitions like Red Bull. Other discourses irrelevant to the dance battle performance itself, including the border, racial, and ethnic conflict, and ongoing and past war histories, are frequently invoked, especially in social media controversies. As a decision is made, the metapragmatic discourse around it can shape its indexical meaning beyond the performance itself, pointing to broader disagreements over values and, at times, conflating dance performance with the value projects of state branding without realizing it. Exploring these indexical inversions (Inoue Reference Inoue2006) in greater depth would require more investigations in future research.

“I see a level that I want to reach”—to watch

“Watching” is central to the learning process of becoming a competitive street dancer. Watching is embedded in the traditional rituals of cipher, where dancers and audience form a circle and take turns entering the space to freestyle, watch, and learn from one another. In battle contexts, watching becomes crucial to the construction of a “dialogue” between competitors, as dancers observe their opponents’ movements, responding by reworking them and demonstrating how they can integrate them more seamlessly into their own freestyle than their opponents. With the proliferation of digital technology, ways of seeing have increasingly been mediated through screens and recordings. Dancers actively watch freestyle videos of senior OGs beyond their immediate social circle to learn from them, take pleasure in watching, or record and review their own dancing.

For dancers training for battle in this program, their task is not to become a judge, but to seek to learn how to grow their dance skills with a reflexive awareness of what the judges are looking for. In this section, I offer an ethnography of the socialization of vision by examining how “watching” becomes the main task in a house dance training session. I show how students distinguish and articulate qualities evinced from pioneer dancers’ bodies through collectively watching video footage and sharing what they see in a co-learning environment. I then show how students train their “watching” skills in battle through exercises. In doing so, I suggest that “watching” does not only involve visual perceptions, but operates through a lamination of the visual, kinetic, sonic, and linguistic channels.

Watching canonical examples

“Don’t look for wild effects. Listen and study. Think of things you are learning and doing, and see how other dancers use them in a battle format.” Before starting our watching event of the final battle in one of the biggest house dance competitions, Summer Dance Forever 2012, held annually in Amsterdam and streamed on YouTube, Mike instructs us on how to direct our gaze, learning what we need to prioritize when we look. The watching session lasts for 13 minutes, conducted mostly in silence with occasional “woo” sounds. As soon as it finishes, we all cheer for the dancers on the screen.

“Let’s talk about it!” Mike invites us to share our thoughts on what we have just watched. It is the first time we do this activity, and the discussion focuses more on sharing observations rather than arriving at better or worse judgements. “Playful,” “relaxed,” “languid,” “patient,” “liquid,” “clear”: these are the terms students use to describe Jack after seeing his performances on screen. These evaluations are not evinced from the perception of Jack (from the US) in isolation but are constructed through comparison with those evinced from Hikaru (from Japan), his opponent. As they provide their evaluations, students provide contextual moments from the dance to illustrate how those qualities were perceived.

Jack’s stronger freestyle performance is perceived by students as his capacity to handle the exhaustion that comes with prolonged performance. The final competition of street dance battle usually consists of two rounds, with each round lasting approximately 1 minute for each person. In this battle between Jack and Hikaru, however, the battle extended to three rounds because the judges could not decide on a winner. This means that Jack and Hikaru are challenged with sustaining their creativity for a total of 3 minutes each. This interpretation is established through what Student A presents as the dancers’ real-time perception of himself, rendered in a represented speech (line 4): “Oh, I run out of ideas, I am just going to move,” perhaps articulates the mindset that Student A aspires to embody on her own when encountering similar moments of exhaustion. In this way, students communicate their evaluations of the dancers from a pedagogical perspective.

Their interpretations also draw on shared epistemic resources developed through training, rather than being made in a vacuum. This is more evident in Student B’s contribution, who traced her watching to a prior exercise in which we identified musical patterns and illustrated musical indexicals through dance movements.

Through these evaluative processes, students collectively build recognition around desirable dance qualities over time through “watching.” This practice mirrors work in linguistic anthropology that demonstrates perception as socially achieved rather than a matter of universal cognition. In Goodwin’s (Reference Goodwin, Resnick, Säljö, Pontecorvo and Burge1997) ethnography of geochemists working to determine the endpoint of an ongoing chemical reaction, the “jet black” color gradually emerges as a conventionalized social fact rather than a universal and natural one. What counts as “blackness” in black color is identified through its differentiation from other tones through social coordination. Comparatively, among this group of practitioners, the desirable qualities of house dance are explored through watching skillful dancers, making comparisons, and selecting qualities so that they can be shared and discussed in the class. Yet students’ recognitions are not stabilized as a scientific fact, but as qualia of spontaneity to be embodied as an artistic endeavor.

At the end of the session, Mike concludes by clarifying his intention behind the watching exercise: not to learn to decide who is “better” but to establish references for the qualities one would like to inherit. “That’s what makes you you,” Mike says.

In the moment of performance and watching, these emblems of “self” do not necessarily settle into a fixed identity label of a dancer, as the shapeshifting bodies keep changing what is being perceived at the moment. Qualities are viewed as contingent achievements of a particular round rather than stable attributes of a dancer. Evaluation does not necessarily close off judgment, but instead keeps oriented toward the next moment of performance until the time is over. If a quality fails to emerge fully as one expects in one round, it remains available as something to be worked on again in the future.

In addition to watching canonical examples, we also train our capacity to capture each other’s movement through exercises. It requires us to imitate the final move performed by the previous dancer and use it as the opening move of our own freestyle, and vice versa. We are challenged to attend closely to the trajectories of the moves made by the dancer before us, remember them, and immediately repeat the same trajectory as the foundation upon which we build our subsequent movements in freestyle. Oftentimes, we stand in a circle and repeat this ritual across several songs. To increase the difficulty, the exercise is often turned into a game: if someone fails to remember and reproduce the previous dancer’s movement, they lose and have to wait until the next round to rejoin. Through exercises like these, we cultivate the capacity to watch, remember, imitate, and respond to others’ movements in real time, foregrounding the body’s responsiveness to the visual sensorium.