Watching Choreography
There are lots of different dancers and choreographers performing choreography all with their own ideas, favourite moves and combinations.
In order to appreciate hip-hop dance choreography fully you need to develop an understanding of what the dancers are doing and see what's going on as they dance.
The first thing you need to pay attention to in hip-hop in general is the beat. Different songs have different beats and the beats are in a big part what makes hip-hop, hip-hop.
What you need to look for when watching choreography is to see how the moves relate to the beat. At certain points, moves will be accented on the beats for effect.
This can be on the loudest most prominent beats, or the ones not so obvious. Any skilled hip-hop choreographer can make routines that will relate to the beats of the song rather than just the 1234 counts.
As hip hop choreographers have different ways of doing things and different styles you may well find that their routines go on different parts of the music too.
For example the moves may mimic one of the instruments if say there is a guitar chord they want to dance on. This can apply to any instrument or sound in the music.
They may also use other parts of the song. They may for example dance to the rhythm of the lyrics and take the melody of that as the basis of the routine.
The dancers at other times instead of responding to the melody, will instead make moves which are about the song instead. So if the vocalist starts singing about the heart, they may do moves which represent the heart.
And here's something else, the choreography can incorporate all, some or none of these elements. So they may jump from dancing on basic 1234 counts to the beats of the music and then to the melody.
So there's a lot that they can work with when coming up with routines. To the unitiated eye these just look like normal routines, but when you can observe how the moves relate to the music you can foster a greater appreciation of what the choreographer and dancers are looking to achieve with their dancing.
Once you get into the habit of looking for these details it will become a natural process because it's a lot more rewarding for you as a viewer. A thing to note is that to see this level of skill the people you are watching usually need to be good dancers and good choreographers.
If you watch amateur videos on YouTube they may not have this level of understanding, but if you watch the bigger names and the professionals they will almost definitely do this.
If you don't look for these details it can be hard to understand what the artist is working with and may look like they're not listening to the music at all - when in fact they have a very good knowledge of it.
Start watching for these details and the way the music is worked with and you will begin to see a whole new hip hop dance.