The intense questioning of the term “urban” has reached ImPulsTanz last summer and has now lead to our decision to remove it from the department titles in the hope to open this discussion in our community too. When we started to use the term in 2015, we have simply adapted what we thought was a suitable umbrella term to subsume art forms that play an important role in our workshop programme.
We recognise that in order to respect the origins and pioneers of these art forms, we need to contribute to raising the awareness about the issue. While we would like to continue the discussion and the questioning with our team, our participants and our peers, we see the department name HipHop & Club Styles as a possible descriptive title with regards to content of the classes and not necessarily as a final solution.
Also we would like to explain that some workshop descriptions may still include the term „urban“ because we do not oblige artists to change their descriptions, but instead would like to enhance an on-going conversation, which in our case takes place within an international context. With a big thanks to our local dance community for pointing out this issue and deep respect for the artists sharing their knowledge about HipHop and Club culture, we invite everyone to send their opinion to workshops@impulstanz.com.
