Adam's House o' Fun

It's been a while since I've last updated, but I've been pretty busy lately, so suck it up princess.

Work's always busy, but in addition to that, I've been looking into buying a condo with Bay, proposed (and been accepted) to Bay, running around planning for all of that, looking into and organizing finances for those things, and in addition to that, planning and organizing a dance workshop that my friend and I are putting on.

My friend approached me about three months ago and asked me if I'd be interested in putting on a popping workshop with him in Nanaimo. I guess he's friends with a girl that works for a dance studio up island, and she was aware that he was into popping, and asked him about it.

Anyhow, I've never really done something like this before, but I've always enjoyed teaching, and I have a real passion about popping, and getting the style a little more recognition on our small island.

I've put together the fundamentals that I'd like to go through, and that's what this entry is about - what I plan on going over, what it is, and how I plan to demonstrate it. The really tricky bits are that, for the most part, I'm entirely self-taught. I basically learned from recording performances on TV, and then them watching over and over, trying to figure out exactly what the dancer was doing that made it look so weird. The upshot of that is that I don't have a really good idea of what the best approach is for teaching this kind of thing. I guess I'll find out how things go after this.

Let's see

1. Popping fundamentals

The goal here is to teach people the basics behind getting a nice hard hit. There's two aspects to this: hitting with the upper body, and hitting with the legs.

Hitting with the upper body involves flexing the muscles in your forearms, neck, chest, abs, and to a lesser extent, biceps and shoulders. I'll make sure here to look out for people that are trying to generate a strong hit just by raising their shoulders up, and then dropping them down - this isn't the correct technique, and might look right at first, but leads to a bunch of problems later on, and really doesn't provide the right foundation to start hitting in more varied situations (try raising your arms above your head, then hitting by dropping your shoulders- it sure isn't easy, and it stops you from maintaining good isolation).

Hitting the legs has always been the toughest part for me, and I only really started to get it down lately. Actually, my friend Jarryd asked me to show him how to glide, and that's gotten me practicing a bunch of those techniques on my own time, including leg hits. To hit with the legs, you just snap your legs back gently at the knee - it doesn't need to be hard, just a gentle snap back. It's subtle, but it adds a whole extra dimension to the pop, and with practice, can really make your hits look powerful. Here I'll just be looking for people that are having trouble with the technique, or are trying to hit their legs by flexing the muscles. I've heard from some people that this is possible, but I find it very difficult, because in a normal upright stance, the leg muscles are already flexed in order to keep you upright.

The last thing I want to show in this segment is a brief routine that people can practice - it's boring just learning foundation if you don't have a routine that you can put it into. I'm not personally a big fan of routines, or fancy move arsenals - I like to learn the foundations of the dance styles, and then just improvise with those. It means I don't have a lot of flashy little things I can do, but I can definitely dance for a long time without repeating the same thing. I'm planning something fairly basic, maybe over the course of 20 bars of music (so 5 sets of 4 beats - 20 hits in total).

2. Waves

Next I want to show some waving. There's almost a limitless amount of ways that you can perform waves through your body: Waves through your arms, waves through your chest, waves up and down your legs, and I've even seen a video where a guy waves through his cheeks and mouth (though I've never tried this technique). I plan to break this down into showing two main techniques: A wave starting at the left hand, up the arm, through the head, and back down the right arm, and second, a wave starting in the hands of both arms, travelling up the arms, through the chest, and down to the legs, then back up the body and out the arms again.

The most important things I can show for both of these techniques are the isolations. The key to a wave looking effective is best explained through the use of an analogy. Imagine a stadium filled with people that are doing a wave. Would it look better if they:

• Stood up and sat back down each individual column of seats at a time, or..
• Stood up and sat back down a quarter of the seats in the stadium at a time.

The answer is obvious - the more sections you can break the stadium up into, the better the wave will look. Your body is exactly the same way, and this is what I'll be looking for when people are testing out the technique.


3. Glides

I'm pretty stoked on this one actually - As I said, my friend had asked me to show him some glides, and so I've spent a good amount of time practicing my gliding technique.

The first thing I realized when I took the workshop I'd written about a few months ago (funkysteppin') was that I'd never ever been given the very basic fundamentals for gliding, so after talking to Jarryd, I set aside some time and focused on exactly this.

This is the starting point for this segment - the first thing I'll show is the stationary glide. This isn't a complicated move, and is a great way for people to start learning the gliding foundations - the raised foot is the foot with all the weight on it, the flat foot is the one that is moving, and that's really all there is to it. This move lets people get a feel for the balance that is required, and really lets you branch out a lot and improvise once you've got the foundation down. I've been working on using this move to work a lot on glides that are similar to the scarecrow walk - lots of motion from one foot, and simple pivots on the other foot. Okay, that description sucked meatsack, but I'll post a video soon showing the technique I'm trying to describe.

So, when showing this technique, the things I'll be looking for will be that people are moving the flat foot, and that the foot with the weight on it is raised up on the ball of the foot. This is a pretty easy starting point.

I'll finish up here by showing some variations on this technique that I've been working on myself.

That's all I've got so far, but that feels like more than enough for the 1.5 hours that we have scheduled. I've given thought to adding in some basic twist-o-flexes if we have time, but we'll see how things are going.

As an excercise, I'll be making some basic videos of the general techniques we plan on showing, and post them to this site. If anyone besides myself still reads this blog, post a comment and let me know if there's anything you think I should add in.

UPDATE: My friend Thomas has been doing some practicing - maybe we'll see some of his own videos up here one day. In the meantime, I put together a few quick videos showing some fundamentals for him - these videos show only the isolations required for the moves in question and are very basic.

Arm Wave Isolations

and

Body Wave Example