Pedagogical Approach
Grounded in Hip-hop culture’s mantra—“peace, love, unity, and having fun”—Snack Break Movement Arts’ curriculum invites students to expand their creative toolkits while centering the mind and body and honoring dance as a cultural language. We create learning frameworks rooted in Hip Hop’s propensity for critical reflexivity, encouraging students to explore identity, community, and social context through movement and dialogue.
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As educators, we embrace the principle of “each one, teach one,” passing down ancestral knowledge by responding to the specific needs of each learning community. We believe that understanding the foundations of Hip-Hop culture deepens students’ engagement with contemporary culture and cultivates essential life skills. Our pedagogy is grounded in the core values of street dance culture—individuality, creativity, innovation, and community—centering inclusivity, historical context, self-expression, and collective transformation.
What We Teach
Snack Break Movement Arts are educator-artists whose teaching practice spans academic, community, and professional dance contexts. Rooted in African American vernacular dance traditions, they offer instruction in multiple techniques and styles—including, but not limited to, Breakin’, House, Hip Hop Social Dance, and Popping—in addition to their original choreographic repertory. SBMA develops workshops, lecture demonstrations, intensives, and residencies that frame embodied practice as a mode of knowledge transmission, cultural literacy, and creative skill-building. Through artist-led, practice-as-research methodologies, their educational work supports participants in engaging dance as both a technical discipline and a site for collective inquiry and exchange.
BODY CONVO
Since Snack Break Movement Arts’ inception, we have sought to cultivate spaces of equitable cohabitation through storytelling and the excavation of intersectional identities. SBMA develops integrative workshops and curated events that center accessibility, exploration, and call-and-response–based dialogue.
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Our most recent workshop, BODY CONVO, invites participants to explore and express identity through improvisational movement prompts, reflexive writing, and the dance cypher as a supportive site for discourse and collective knowledge-making. Grounded in a practice-as-research approach, BODY CONVO foregrounds dance as a communal form of storytelling and moves through five sequential entry points: individuality, musicality, communication, observation, and call-and-response.