The Dance seminars offered at Mosaic are not meant for the trained dancer, but as a way to introduce the discipline of dance and movement to students in an exploratory fashion. Students will begin to understand dance as an art form through the lens of dancers, choreographers, and audience members. Students will also examine the cultural ties of the dance form, looking at how history has shaped and molded it. For example, in the African Dance to Hip-hop Seminar, students will understand the specific role that West African dance has played in the culture of West African peoples. Students will begin to understand how through the slave trade and African Diaspora, African Dance traditions were brought to the Americas. Overtime, these traditions have evolved and adapted. Today’s Hip-Hop dance movement stems from African Dance traditions, where both forms share similar stepping patterns, body focus and poly-rhythmic movements. As students begin to become familiar with both dance forms, they will discover how much these two forms have in common, while at the same remaining distinctively different.