Introduction

In the 2012 documentary A Batalha do Passinho (translated into English as Passinho Dance Off), filmmaker Emílio Domingos attempts to capture a history of passinho, the street dance form born in the favela of Rio de Janeiro, by documenting the role of YouTube in catapulting local dancers into becoming international stars. The obsession with recording and seeing oneself and one’s friends and rivals on screen matches the energy with which the mostly teenaged boys and young adult men practice and battle each other on street corners and parties. Ultimately, the documentary presages the familiar phenomenon in which a street dance style pioneered by a socially and economically disenfranchised population of mostly black male urban youth evolves into a legitimized dance form enabled by regional-as-nationalist recognition and capitalist circulation.