Dance Journal #6 - June 25, 2006

It's been a while since I've made a dancing-related entry, but that doesn't mean I haven't been practicing. I've been practicing fairly regularly, and I try and go out once a week to excercise what I'm working on in an actual dance setting (like Squash, doing drills/practicing and actually using the skills you've learned in a game/real scenario are two different things).

Dance-wise, I've been spending a lot of time practicing my hits. Hits are the primary component of popping, one of the dance styles that I'm into. If you've seen So you think you can dance, you've probably seen what hits look like in Onion's audition video. It's a tensing of the muscles in your body to give the illusion of a powerful shock hitting your body. Usually you do this at the start/finish of a movement, but there's a lot of room for variation.

I went to the clinic the other day because my left elbow had been hurting me for a while, and it turns out I have tennis elbow. Whaaaat? That's ridiculous, I'm a squash player, not stupid tennis. I got it from lifting weights a few months ago, but never took any proactive steps to fix it, so apparently it just sits around waiting for you to actually do something about it. I'm wearing some kind of band for the tendons in my arm for the next three weeks, and I've already been burned twice by getting called Justin Timberlake. That'll do some long-lasting emotional damage if it keeps up.

Because my elbow is healing, I'm trying to spend the time practicing hitting with my legs. Hitting with your legs generates an added dimension to your hit, and really lets you hit with more power. I've always focused on training the muscles in my upper body, and neglected my legs. Hopefully by focusing on leg hits whie my elbow is healing, I can get them to a level I'm happy with and really start to pop hard.

As an aside, the keys to a good hit are: isolation, timing, and the ability to tense and relax your muscle quickly and readily.

• Isolation means that you're hitting with specific muscles - sometimes you don't want to hit with your whole body - you just finished moving your arm, it should be your arm that is making the hit. Isolating the correct muscles and hitting with those makes the hit look a lot cleaner.
• Timing is critical with any kind of dance. If you're not moving with rhythm, you're not dancing. Before you do anything, you have to learn how to count the beats in music, and that these ultimately control everything that you do. Hits need to be correctly timed to the music - you don't necessarily have to hit on every single beat, but you should be starting stopping your movements with the beats, and hitting at the start/end of those movements.
• Being able to tense and relax your muscles quickly and readily is a skill that you need to train your muscles to be able to do. I think I remember learning in a weight-lifting class about quick-twitch and slow-twitch muscle-fiber (maybe twitch isn't the right word) - by practicing your hits, your body will build more quick-twitch muscle fiber, which will in turn allow you to hit faster, more readily, and harder.

When I first started hitting it felt very awkward, but the more I practiced (and it's so easy to practice, since you can do something as simple as flexing the muscles in your arm while waiting for the bus), the more natural it started to feel. I don't even think about actually making the hit now, I just do it in time with the music.

The beauty of learning to hit is that it can be used to complement any type of motion. Something as simple as walking in a straight path can be made to look totally weird just by hitting on each step you take, in time with the music.

So.. I've got some videos I've put together here. First up is a video showing some of the hitting I've been working on. My camera is starting to die on me it seems, so the video quality is a bit off. When I next have cash for it, I'd like to buy a hybrid camera so that I can take better videos. The hitting video is here. Bad quality aside, some of the hits I'm making are visible, and that's an improvement over a few weeks ago when I tried to film some popping (you have to hit reasonably hard to get them to show up on camera).

Starting at 14 seconds onwards, I start to do some dimestopping as well. Dimestopping is a technique where you hit, then shake in place for a few seconds. This gives the illusion that my body is a very large hydraulic machine, and is shaking back and forth as the momentum dissapates. The key to a good dimestop is to hit hard when you initially stop, then allow yourself to just wobble gently back and forth in the direction you were moving. You don't want to move too much or it won't look convincing.

I put together a few videos breaking down the isolations for arm and body waves. The videos look pretty weak when you watch them, specifically because of the fact that I've broken the moves down very slowly. If you're having trouble seeing the connection between what I'm doing in the video, and the way a wave actually looks when it's done properly, just drag the slider on your video player to speed up the video and you'll be able to see that it really is the same illusion.

The first video is for arm waves. I'm doing something wrong here though - when doing arm waves, it is important (at least at first) to leave your arm up in the same position after the wave has passed through it. If you drop your arm right after doing the wave, there is less visible for the wave to be compared to visually and you lose some of the effect. I cheat and do this a few times.

The next set of videos is body wave from the side and from the front. I was having trouble figuring out exactly what it is that I do with my knees to isolate them for the wave. I think what I normally do is to roll them each outward in a circle, then back in. If you look closely you can see me doing this.

These two videos tie in nicely with one another - arm waves lead naturally to a body wave, since you have to puff out your chest as one of the isolations for the arm wave. At this point, it is easy enough to carry the wave either downwards through your stomach and legs, or continue across through your other arm. This is just one of the many combinations that you can do once you have some of the fundamentals of popping and waving down - there's a huge canvas upon which to express yourself with dance.

Lastly is a really bad video I made trying to break down the basics of a very simple twist-o-flex. Twist-o-flexes are meant to give the illusion of your body being segmented at various points and being able to rotate those segments individually along your vertical axis. There are many different types of flexes, but the one I'm doing here is just the most basic twist-o-flex I know of. The key the move is to learn to move your feet, as I do, without turning your upper body very much. The less you can turn your upper body, the better. You can get away with more than you'd think with this move, since you speed it up when actually dancing and the viewer's eyes won't notice if you're not keeping your torso perfectly straight. The key, as always, is to practice and get things as close and as well isolated as possible.

Practice on leg hits will be posted as I come up with some. For now, that's already a ton of writing today, so I'll put this entry to bed.