From street to studio: hip hop comes inside.

Emilio "Buddha Stretch" Austin, Jr., best known for his hip hop crews Elite Force and Mop Top Music and Movement, teaches hip hop classes at Manhattan's Steps on Broadway. But he remembers when dance studios didn't offer any hip hop at all. Houston dancer Chris "Colcutz" Gamez and New York Culture Shock artistic director Ellie Burkey remember, too. Burkey used to freestyle with friends in the garage; Gamez got noticed performing at a street fair. Now Burkey teaches at Peridance and Gamez at his own studio in Houston, Urgeworks, which offers hip hop almost exclusively. Over the years, hip hop has moved inside, into the mainstream, and that transition has had a huge effect on studios, dancers, and the dance itself.

There are obvious benefits to the spotlight that music videos and movies have shone on hip hop: more educational resources, more versatile dancers, and more jobs. Studios that offer hip hop are likely to bring in more students--especially more boys--and more money.

"Learning weaving, popping, and locking is important for working dancers," Burkey says. "At auditions, they want dancers who are diverse, and dancers are getting smart. They're learning everything. They want a more urban line to their dancing. Adding hip hop is cross-training for dancers and revenue for studios. Studios that are smart are listening to who's coming in."

But that doesn't mean it's all good. Even though more and more studios have hip hop, many teachers and dancers don't necessarily get it. "There are a lot of jazz dancers out there doing pseudo hip hop," says Stretch. "A lot of teachers don't know the history, they're just teaching the steps. They're learning from videos, but they don't know the culture. If all you see is Britney Spears, you think that's hip hop, but that's never been hip hop. It's completely watered down. And studios could care less, because hip hop is one of their biggest moneymakers."

Stretch started as a street dancer; he got a big break in 1986 at the now-defunct Union Square Club, where an improvised performance one night landed him six months of gigs opening for musical groups like Salt-N-Pepa, Eric B. and Rakim, and DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince. He later toured with hip hop headliners Run-D.M.C. and did video work for Mariah Carey. In 1989 he began teaching at the original Broadway Dance Center. Until then, hip hop hadn't really entered a formal setting. Why? "Hip hop, breaking, locking, popping, b-boying--they all started out as social dances," he says. "Being at a studio is not a social event."

Like Stretch, Gamez started dancing in clubs as well as garages, inspired by footage of New York's Wrecking Shop that aired on Houston's Channel 8 in the early '90s. "We started watching that, mimicking it, developing our own style," he says. "I liked the freedom of it, the liveliness. I grew up in a ghetto area, and here I was seeing people from the other side of the country who looked like they grew up in ghetto areas. I liked seeing guys doing it, guys who were not wearing tights."

When he and a friend began studying in the dance department at Houston's Lamar High School, they were put into an advanced modern class, the closest fit to what they were doing in the all-male hip hop crew, Fly (sadly, now defunct). Gamez's studies segued into teaching class at Lamar. His first year, he said, he had 180 students, a figure which doubled the following year, inspiring him eventually to open his own studio. "When I started, there was nowhere to go," he says. "Now every studio in town that I know of has a hip hop class."

The hip hop show he performs for Young Audiences illustrating math basics attracts students to his studio, the majority of whom are boys. His goal is to teach them the history and culture of hip hop as well as the style.

The challenge in moving from the street to the studio, says Stretch, is maintaining hip hop's freshness and improvisational style. "When you take it out of the clubs and put it in the studio, you lose some of that street element, which is spontaneity," he says. "You don't get freestyle, you get 5, 6, 7, 8."

As a house dancer (club dancer), Burkey agrees. "When you're taking it into the studio, you have to be aware of how to break things down, and how to pull what's original into class," she says. "Hip hop is a hard style to get. You have to learn how to groove and how to hit, and you have to learn where it comes from."

Dancers from all disciplines are doing just that, and Brooklyn Ballet dancer Regine Metayer has learned just how tough that can be. Besides ballet, she has studied jazz, tap, modern, and the folkloric dancers of her native Haiti. She began hip hop to challenge herself. "The first day, I cried my eyes out," she says. "Many people think that if you can do classical, you can do it all, but I'm learning a lot. The challenge in ballet is that you always have to be up. In hip hop you have to be grounded. Jazz and folklore and some Graham in college helped me get my grounding, but I still point my toes in my sneakers. People see me and say, 'Oh, she's a ballerina.' "

Ballerinas and jazz dancers make up the bulk of students in Stretch's classes. "They're coming to learn what hip hop is," he said. "There's been hip hop for years, but it's just now picking up because of movies like You Got Served and Honey. The kids want to do what they saw." The ones who get good at it, he says, are the ones who take it seriously and school themselves, something he recommends to all dancers who want to become well-rounded. "Don't just do the steps, learn the energy, the feeling behind the steps," he says. "Anybody can do choreography. Find someone who's passionate about what they're doing."

Heather Wisner is a freelance writer in Winston-Salem, Oregon.