Overview and Last Year's Accomplishments

Sheffield Hallam Street and Break-dance Society 

2009 – 2010 Hallam’s Best Society!

The last academic year was a great year for Sheffield Hallam Street and Break-dance Society. The society won Best Society at Hallam and Best Event for our Live, Laugh, Love, Dance show. Our performance took place at Library Theatre and raised around £900 for the Sheffield Children’s Charity. The event was a collaborative one, which the Salsa Society, Belly Dancing Society, Cheerleading Society and local Demolition Dance Crew (DDC) also took part. The night was a great success and everyone agreed that it was all worth the extra hours of practice we had put in. 

However, this wasn’t the only event we took part in. We volunteered to freestyle at our Universities International Week, performed at the Hubs to show our support for the Volunteers at the university’s Hats off to Volunteers Event and the Society collaborated again with the Cheerleading Society to compete at the annual Sheffield Varsity Competition, which Hallam University ended up winning by two points. We had also represented our university at Loughborough Dance competition for the first time last year.

Our links had also improved over the course of 2009 to 2010, we now have established links with Twisted Elements Entertainment, who are the leading supplier of entertainment and nightlife solutions to the leisure and corporate industries both in the UK and Internationally. We have also enhanced our links locally with three more of our members Benoit Cordier, Martyn Mclaughlin and Kirsty Allen dancing at Players Sports Bar, West Street. We now have a total of five members working at Players, along with the three mentioned we have two teachers working there, Pierre Lafayette-Marsh and Angga Kara.

All of the teachers have a vast amount of experience but Pierre Lafayette-Marsh and Sinead Burke are two of the teachers that you will most likely have heard of. Pierre (our Creative Hip Hop/ Freestyle teacher) and his dance partner together known as the Urban Jokers were Semi – finalists on Move like Michael Jackson BBC 3. Sinead, who teaches Lyrical Hip Hop, got all the way through to the finals of Nike Danceclash and she was in the top 100 dancers and made it down to the final 48 in the dance competition So You Think You Can Dance on BBC 1. Nathan Geering, the society’s Breaking teacher, was an original cast member for Jonzi D's hiphop theatre show "TAG: Me vs the City.” Last but by no means least is Angga our Old School teacher, has taken part in a numerous festivals including the Edingborough Festival and the Liverpoool Brouhaha Festival. Also he has performed for the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts and received two thumbs up from Paul McCartney.

This society provides an excellent opportunity to fulfil your dancing potential and make new friends in the process. We welcome all experience levels of dancers to those of you who want to try something new and start up a new hobby, to those of you who have been dancing for a long time. We have the best teachers who specialise in and deliver great classes for Creative Hip Hop, Breaking, Popping, Locking, House and Lyrical Hip Hop. Our experienced teachers are extremely good at breaking down each routine for each individual so you never feel out of your depth. 

Those already at the society as well as the Committee members all vary in ability and style, so we help each other out in class and make each session easy going and most of all fun! We hold classes on Mondays, Breaking is at 6pm – 7pm, Creative Hip Hop/ Freestyle class 7pm – 8pm and on Thursday 6pm – 7pm we have Old School, then the Lyrical Hip Hop class is straight after, 7pm – 8pm. If you would like more information add us on facebook or contact us on hallam_breakers@hotmail.co.uk. We hope to see you there.

Timothy Bei

Illustration by George Law