Urban dances, also known as street dance, are Afro-diasporic expressions that emerge in the streets, alleys, and backstreets of the world's peripheries. They spring from listening to the body, from encounters with sound, with the beat pulsing through the ground, with the urgencies that permeate the daily lives of those who dance to avoid going mad. These dances are not merely styles or aesthetic performances; they are experiences of survival, collectivity, and invention. They are worldly practices that break with Eurocentric codes about art and the body, reclaiming other epistemologies that teach us to live in communion, in resistance, in movement.

The research I develop with the Dance of Indignation stems from the understanding that dancing is more than performing. It's formulating thought, producing knowledge, and creating breathing spaces in the concrete of the city. And it's precisely in this breathing space that urban dances become essential—for the individuals who dance, for the communities that recognize themselves in these practices, and for the construction of an anti-racist and counter-colonial society.

Urban dances constitute a territory of artistic, political, and social development. How many young people haven't discovered their potential through a neighborhood dance group? How many haven't understood the world and themselves through training, a battle, a post-rehearsal conversation? These spaces are informal schools where we learn more than just steps: we learn ethics, we learn about care, listening, and community. We learn to be.

When a Black, marginalized, and dissident body dances, it strains the structures that marginalize it. And more than that: it proposes other forms of existence. Urban dances are embodied pedagogies that foster a sense of community, strengthen support networks, and generate new forms of belonging. They teach how to deal with failure, with improvisation, with the celebration of difference. And at the same time, they build self-esteem, recognition, and a sense of purpose.

In a society that insists on symbolically and physically killing our bodies, dancing is a gesture of insubordination. It's a life strategy. It's a choreographed manifesto that says: I will not succumb. It's also a tool for social organization, as many urban dance collectives and companies take on cultural mediation roles in the territories where they operate, creating festivals, occupying public spaces, training new artists, and fostering intergenerational encounters.

Therefore, defending the importance of urban dance also means defending the right to the city, to leisure, to education, to culture, and to freedom. It means recognizing that these dancing bodies harbor a living body of knowledge that doesn't fit within the formal framework of academia, but which is fundamental to re-enchanting the world.

Urban dances help us reimagine the future. They operate according to different logics, which do not separate art from life, which understand the body as political territory and the street as a space for creation. These practices are nourished by ancestry, by listening to the drums that crossed the Atlantic and arrived here, reinventing languages, bodies, and possible worlds.

Dancing, in this context, is resisting with joy. It's pulsating affection where they want to produce fear. It's designing with the body a new grammar for living. It's insisting, with every gesture, that art is a weapon against erasure. As long as we dance, we will be building paths to freedom. And we will dance for ourselves, for our loved ones, and for the world we want to make spin.