Street dance: Young people between recreation projects and work

Abstract

It was intended in this research to understand the processes of construction of the urban juvenile identities starting from the cultural expressions of the group Street Dancers who identify themselves with the hiphop culture. The integrants of this group were between 15 and 24 years old in 2004, when the field research was initiated. A research that assumed ethnographic characteristics was made, with observation and listening of statements of the youth of the group, in public spaces, as the Campo de São Bento, in Niterói, where the group Street Dancers did activities that can be defined as cultural practices that combined simultaneously with leisure proposals, search for social recognition and possibility of insertion in the artistical-cultural working world. It was observed that the group sociability enabled provisionally, the construction of a collective project around the dance, having as main question associationism, that is, walking together searching to transform leisure in paid work and garanty of survival.