Based on fieldwork undertaken in Paris in 2001, (Shapiro, Kauffmann, and McCarren: La danse hip-hop: apprentissage, transmission, socialisation; Rapport pour la Mission du Patrimoine Ethnologique, Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication 2002), this paper considers how a new form of French hip-hop, la danse urbaine,. stages "difference." Created by dancers often from working-class backgrounds and immigrant families, French hip-hop has, in the last decade, achieved critical respect as an art form now programmed at the level of the "scènes nationales." In "Monsieur Hip-Hop" (in Blackening Europe; The African American Presence, ed. Heike Raphael, Routledge, 2003), I argued that cultural differences as well as a strategic politique culturelle helped to create this dance in France: within the mode of homage to an African-American authenticity that characterizes the rhetoric of the "mouv'," young dancer-choreographers drawing on many forms of traditional and concert dance accessible in France have articulated their differences from a commercialized, globalized form and its imitative practices. Grounded in the inclusivity of "black/blanc/beur," and the "fonds d'action sociale," urban dancers have elaborated a political-social identity via a dance form with the dimensions of a civic art, staging their difference even as their art is "recuperated" by a republican assimilationist model.

Here I will explore French hip hop's response to the strong mimetic current of global hip-hop culture within the realm of its instruction: via texts, via video and television, and in the dance studio, where the interpretation of steps in their transmission, a creative use of the mirror, and an ignorance concerning the lyrics of American rap music-- often inspiring the movement-- mark the teaching and choreography of the most interesting companies. In these examples, French hip-hop emerges not as a global but as a profoundly local form: arguably international, arguably universal, but the product of a diverse and yet particularly French urban environment.