Middle-aged woman in a dance class with older adults and light-colored walls, daytime indoor setting.

3:47

Team SCA 1.7M views Save

How an earthquake led to a senior hip-hop crew

Name: How an earthquake led to a senior hip-hop crew
Uploaded: 2015-03-13T14:02:27Z
Duration: 3 min 47 s
Description: Fresh new young talent, the announcer says, and out comes the Hip Op-eration Crew. Their average age is 80.

Fresh new young talent, the announcer says, and out comes the Hip Op-eration Crew. Their average age is 80. more

The crew began with Billie Jordan, who was injured in the Christchurch earthquake. In the middle of it, she thought she might not have done as much as she wanted to with her life. So she moved to Waiheke Island, a little island off New Zealand's North Island.

The senior citizens she met every day in the shops had the same worry. Her answer was to start a dance group, though by her own account she is not a dancer at all and had no idea how to dance. She noticed they loved it anyway.

So she told them they were now a hip-hop dance group, explained what hip-hop is, and gave them a deadline. In eight months, they would perform at the world hip-hop championships.

Everybody asked how a bunch of senior citizens could get to the Olympics of hip-hop that fast. One dancer was blind, a lot of them had dementia, and the leader had no dance experience. Who on earth were we kidding, Billie says.

Middle-aged woman in a dance class with older adults and light-colored walls, daytime indoor setting. The headline runs in white letters across the lower third. — Fresh new young talent, the announcer says, and out comes the Hip Op-eration Crew.

Eight months later, they were dancing at the world championships. They didn't win, but they made Guinness World Records as the oldest dance group in the world.

The dancers' own reasons are plain. One lives on her own and says that if she did not get out and enjoy things, she might stay home and cry. She loves music, too. Music is my subject, she says, and being on the beat is very good.

An elderly woman with white hair speaks, wearing a patterned shirt under a dark jacket. A headline runs in white letters across the lower third. — For the dancers, the crew is a reason to get out of the house and onto the beat.

Good genes are a start, a dancer says, but you do have to do things that are dangerous, or you're not having a really happy life. Dancing makes her feel alive and probably a bit younger. She had her 96th birthday that Tuesday, and it made her feel she wasn't as old as all that.

The last word goes to a woman who says she came from a really awful background, with no contact with any family. Now she has a close family, with mothers coming out of her ears. She used to think the world was an unhappy place. Now she's surrounded by all these great, amazing women.

#dancing