Mixing Styles
If you know different dance styles or can pull moves from different styles you may want to combine them when you freestyle.
This can look good when done well but you have to be careful. Some styles don't really work together whereas others such as popping and locking, or hip hop and popping do.
There are of course no rules in freestyle so unless you are battling you will not be confined into doing one style. This of course means that you will have to use your head and be discerning where appropriate.
Combining ballet and hip hop would seem a long stretch of the imagination and probably highly unlikely. If you did do it you would have to do it very skilfully so it would make sense to practise beforehand.
There are of course fusion dance styles that are acknowledged already such as jazz-funk or lyrical hip hop dance. These are things people have already combined in the past and have found can work well together.
At times it won't be necessary for the different styles to blend seamlessly. You may want to keep them apart so that people watching know you are changing styles completely. You usually need to choose one or the other though, blending or keeeping things very separate.
There are no limits on how many dance styles you can include in your freestyles. If you're trained in lots of dance styles, it may seem natural to you to do all of them and you may feel strange doing just one.
Freestyle is all about expressing yourself, so whether that is in one dance style or a number or styles you've got to make the call.
The more out there it is, and the less people will be familiar with it, the better it will have to be as a general rule of thumb.
So if you want to do some hip hop and then do a little bit of robot, and then a little bit of tutting that's up to you.
If it feels good to you and it looks good, why not?
Also remember that the style of music plays a role too. So if you're dancing in a hip-hop style and suddenly the music changes to something more relaxed and chilled, you probably won't want to stick to aggressive moves if that's what you were doing.
The different dance styles have accompanying styles of music that they are traditionally danced to, though these do not need to be followed strictly. But they give you a good guideline into what works with what.
If the music goes latin and you know salsa, then bingo that's probably going to suit the music much better than say contemporary dance. Whereas for a very sad song, contemporary or lyrical might just be the key.
Make sure what you do makes sense with the music, usually up-tempo dance music gives you the most choice as you can do any number of styles and still have it work well.