FOR THE KIDS : Learning to Dance With Dose of Attitude

Dance instructor Diana Lehan is demonstrating some hip-hop moves to a class of kids. Clicking on a rap tape, she jumps, punches the air, jerks her shoulders and stomps her feet with rhythmic force.

Then the class tries it. They do the steps with perky grace.

“That was so pretty,” Lehan says, exaggerating the “so” for emphasis. “Do I want pretty? NOOO!”

Lehan, who wears clunky black boots over her dance tights, teaches hip-hop dancing to kids through the parks and recreation departments of Ventura and Camarillo.

Hip-hop is more than just a dance. It’s a whole culture that started with the gritty rap music of black urban youth in the 1980s. Since then, it’s gone mainstream. Flick on MTV, and there it is.

Lehan calls hip-hop dancing “a lot of hopping and jumping with an attitude.” And what’s the attitude? “Cool, aggressive, hey I’m important, hey look at me.”

It started in the street with break dancing, said Lehan, who isn’t what you’d expect in a hip-hop teacher. She has grown children. With formal ballet training, she has had a long career as a professional dancer and choreographer.

But her heart is now in hip-hop. She takes several hip-hop classes a week in the Los Angeles area. One of her teachers is a street dancer who has never taken a formal dance lesson.

“I try and go as close to the source as I can,” she says. Kids like hip-hop, she says, because they don’t need formal dance training to pick up the moves quickly. They can dance alone or with a partner.

She usually has a dozen or so students in her Ventura classes. On this day there are five girls, the youngest is 9-year-old Tawny Main of Ventura. Her mother is watching at the back of the room.

Tawny, a Michael Jackson fan, likes to stand in front of the television and imitate the hip-hop moves she sees on MTV. “She used to just wiggle around,” says her mother, Kathleen Main. Now, after a few classes from Lehan, “she’s more organized.”

Colleen McConville, 12, took up hip-hop after a broken arm sidelined her from gymnastics. Her mother, Barbara McConville, suggested ballet and jazz. Colleen wanted hip-hop.

“I’m not real fond of rap music,” her mother said. “But it’s a good form of exercise.”

By now Lehan has the class sweating. They’ve practiced steps like the “running man,” the “smurf,” and one she calls the “Fred Astaire.” Then she has them work on portions of a dance routine.

“That’s too gentle,” she advises them. “That’s like an aerobics class. I want to hear those feet.”

In hip-hop, clothes are important. “Real hip-hoppers wear boots, like combat boots, or high tennis shoes,” she says later. “Clothing is loose.” Hip-hop is not sensual, like jazz, she explains. It’s asexual.

Most hip-hop dancing is done to rap music. In her class, Lehan uses fairly mainstream rappers like M. C. Hammer, Arrested Development, Kris Kross, Queen Latifah, Icy Blu and Kool Moe Dee. She screens “every single word,” avoiding music that advocates violence or is too sexually explicit for kids.

Darlene Zugnoni, who teaches hip-hop dancing to kids through the Rancho Simi Park and Recreation Department, takes it a step further; she lets parents hear the rap music and decide what is not appropriate.

“There are certain songs I won’t play or buy if it’s to be used in the class,” said Zugnoni, who also takes hip-hop and jazz classes several times a week in Los Angeles.

In her classes, she teaches the steps and then strings them into a routine that the kids eventually show parents. Sometimes she has boys in the class. They seem to like the strong, down-to-earth style of hip-hop. How does Zugnoni describe the attitude thing?

“It shows you have confidence,” she said.

FYI

Here’s where you can find hip-hop classes.

* Ventura Recreation and Park Department, on Mondays, June 28 through Aug. 23, 5 to 6 p.m., for ages 9 and older; cost $36. For information, 658-4726.

* Pleasant Valley Recreation and Park District in Camarillo, on Thursdays, June 17 through July 22, 5:30 to 6:30 p.m., for ages 6 and older; cost $29. For information, 482-1996.

* Rancho Simi Recreation and Park District, on Wednesdays, June 30 through Aug. 11, 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., for ages 8 through 13; cost $35. For information, 584-4400.

* Young Olympians offers classes through the Boys & Girls Clubs in Ventura, Moorpark and Simi Valley, as well as other locations in the county. For information, 642-6098.