August 2007 Archives

It's been quite a while since I've written about dancing - it's been the most neglected of my outlets for the last while, so tonight - that's where the spotlight points.

I've just come back from a night of squash drills and dance practice, and am now sitting in my chair pounding away at the keyboard to ensure that carpal tunnel syndrome is just one of the many gifts I give to medicare as I continue to rot away.

Squash drills are getting better, and I'm starting to feel a little more aligned. I have lessons booked again for the first time since I think I moved, which would have been late May.

I find that I can learn a bunch from a lesson of any kind, then need some time to apply it. If I stop taking them, I find that I start to stray from the "true path" that I want to follow in my squash game. The path where my mental game and strategy match my physical ability.

Squash is my physical outlet, one of my social outlets, and a mental one too, to a lesser extent. However, when I start to focus on one thing too much, the pull of the other forces of my personality get neglected. I was focusing on squash too much lately, and then started to lack these other aspects. Then, that started to manifest itself in my game. No good!

So, my friend Steve suggested to Graham and I that he has a good place to get together and do some dancing. An aside - I learn dancing the exact same way I learn other things - I need to sit and practice it and break it down mentally in order to progress.

In an effort to get something going that could be semi-regular, we're booking Friday evenings for a scheduled session. Hopefully more videos come as a result of this, and this continues to motivate us. Dancing never ever leaves my focus entirely, but it's nice when I devote time to it.

I'm working on a couple of techniques right now:

The first technique is footwork related. The more means by which a popper has to traverse the dance floor, the more exciting their dancing is. Having a large set of foundation from which to draw upon is one of the keys to dynamic and engaging dancing.

When I took the workshop last year with my friend Simon, one thing that I learned was the stationary glide - I believe the analogous mime technique is called the forced walk. The concept is simple - give the illusion of walking on the spot. This technique is really the foundation of gliding, and I have never taken the time to learn it properly.

Some, I've been putting lots of time into this one. The beauty of this is that it is a breeze to practice. We turn on music, and I just walk slowly around the room. Don't force doing this to the beat, but make sure that you are aware of it when you are moving - focus on that aspect and let the rest come naturally.

I'm gradually getting better at bending the whole way through the ball of the foot that my weight is on, which strengthens the illusion. My ultimate goal is to reach the point where this becomes seamless, and then I can forget about it and let it seep into the rest of my dancing.

Second technique - I'm working on isolating my leg hits better, and making them play nice with my chest.

For those of you just joining now, a hit is the aspect of popping where you flex the muscles in your body, and give your knee a very little snap to provide the illusion of a jolt travelling through your body. The two elements that I like to focus on in my hits are crispness and strength.

You achieve strength by practicing hitting with the muscles and building up their ability to tense hard, and then relax straight away (the muscle has to prepare for the next beat where it may need to hit again).

You achieve crispness by properly isolating the muscle groups that are hitting. That means those muscle groups and only those muscle groups tense. This obviously requires control, which you can only build up through practice.

The practicing that I'm currently focusing on is learning to properly hit with my chest (difficult because it affects your breathing), and with my legs, together, and crisply. You see, I hit my legs differently than the rest of my body - I snap the knee back ever so slightly instead.

Merging these two types of movement together is like trying to rub your head and pat your belly, to the beat, with other movements thrown in on top of that. It requires practice until you can just let it be automatic.

The third and last technique I'm focusing on is my ability to hit when I'm bent over.

I'll ellaborate. One of the foundation techniques for popping is called the Fresno (named after the location in California where it was created by, I believe, Boogaloo Sam). You can see me going into and out of the Fresno a few times in this video - look for any time that I am moving back and forth and sticking out either my left or right hand, then hitting. Stop, repeat motion in the opposite direction, stick out other hand, hit. Repeat.

I was telling my friend Steve - the purpose of a technique like this is that it forms the palette from which we paint the rest of your dance. You want this move to be effortless and thoughtless - the simpler it is, the easier it is for you to improvise with it. That's why you want to get good at the Fresno. You practice this, forget about it, and then just do it when you have nothing else you can immediately think to do. Stay with your foundation and inspiration will find you (and this is not at all exclusive to dancing).

Anyhow, part of making that foundation solid is learning to hit the Fresno in different positions - one of those positions is down low with my arms out. Dropping my body lower makes my dancing more dynamic, because I'm now utilizing a new visual plane. Don't underestimate how important this kind of thing can be. It's subtle, but makes a world of difference.

Those are my current areas of focus. I've left a fairly large video this time, because breaking it up into individual movies of each technique is time consuming, makes for boring watching, and removes the element of improvising that is much more interesting to watch, and that I don't get to show if I only cut things into the appropriate techniques.

In the interest of remaining down with the latest technologies (sliced bread really caught me off guard), I'm giving YouTube embedding a try. The video should appear below...

You can also save the result here. The start is boring - it's just me practicing the fresno and some specific poses for it. Skip that if you like, but some people may appreciate seeing what I do to learn something. General consensus seems to be that around 1:10 things get a little more exciting.

I'm in the process of picking out shirts, shorts, and the most comfortable shoes I own in preparation for VEMF.

VEMF is the Victoria Electronic Music Festival. Upon reading the words "Electronic Music", half of the people that are reading this blog (so, 7.5 people, roughly) have shut down their browsers. I don't know exactly why that is, but electronic music seems to have some magical tendency to remain significantly underground in the public eye. People have either never heard any of it, or love it, and there's very little middle ground in between.

I'm not sure why this is. It could be related to the fact that electronic music at a genre is not reducible to just one style - even it's nomenclature really only implies the general type of sounds that are used, and the means of production involved in creating that music. We can also add into the mixture the fact that most people associate electronic music with RAEVERS. Don't get me wrong, I was once also a raever, and could be found dancing late into the morning - however, and this may be a news flash to some, raevers in general are not seen in a particularly positive light (though I think they're faring better than Emo kids are these days).

VEMF started about 7 years ago, in a format that I like to describe as "shitty". I didn't complain at the time, and I still wouldn't - whoever had organized it had taken the effort to rent out the Open Air stage in Centenniel square, brought in DJ's to play, and suddenly we had a place to dance during the day! There were no beer gardens, and the whole affair was pretty sketchy in general, but it was a start.

There was a hiatus for a few years after that, and then things started back up proper - the last four years have been a testament to the popularity and strength of the electronic music scene on the island - there's been a lot of people helping out, and as time has passed, the festival has built up from a grungy open air stage to a well organized, recognized event, with interactive workshops, and, yah, some beer gardens too.

In the past I have participated solely by dancing, but this year, I'm volunteering as well, which is cool, because I'm looking forward to the chance to interact with people. At the end of the last festival, my friend Davin and I had talked about the possibility of me running a dance workshop to break down some of the dance styles that most people will see when out around this kind of music. I loved the idea, and I've always loved teaching the art, but with a wedding to plan and a condo purchase in the works, I figured it would be spreading myself much too thin to take on any other tasks, especially one of this scale.

Why a dance workshop? Well, pretty much because I'm selfish. I don't like putting myself on stage or showing off. As a matter of fact, I find it very hard to dance when I'm being watched, because it makes it very hard for me to separate myself from the audience. But, I love meeting and talking with other dancers, and I love sharing ideas with other people related to the art (that doesn't mean I like to pontificate about dancing at them - I like to hear their opinions and trade mine). I can't think of a better way to make that happen than to do a workshop.

Secondary to that is the fact that the urban dance scene on our island is pretty weak. My friend Graham and I learned to dance from watching video tapes of much music performances in slow motion. There was nowhere to go and take classes, and talking to anyone about popping was a great way to get a blank stare in return. It's been a frustrating nine years, broken up with the scant two dance workshops that I've been able to go and take, and I've had to unlearn many mistakes along the way. It would feel good, for a variety of reasons, to be able to help provide some direction and visibility to the art forms.

Third, is the fact that I want to counteract the negative connotation that learning to dance a certain way seems to have earned itself in the scene. The most common response when suggesting something like a workshop or tutorial videos, at least from my experience dealing specifically with rave boards and forums, is, "You shouldn't teach someone how to dance. They should just do what feels right".

This is true, to an extent, but within every form of self-expression, there are basic building blocks that we all must learn to use. This blog is broken up into paragraphs, and I'm using grammar to make my writing semi-legible. An artist learns the fundamentals of paint and brush-strokes prior to going and painting his masterpiece. So too must a dancer learn the foundations for the styles of dance that they wish to pursue.

Don't get me wrong - true geniuses in various forms of art often succeed by breaking those molds and rules, and creating new styles in their own right. But not before learning the original foundations themselves. I always see great art as being that which derives new ways to creatively bend and break the rules - it's a little like Neo from The Matrix when he learns how to defeat Agent Smith. That was pretty sweet hey? I liked when he did Kung Fu.

Uh, right.. VEMF. So, I've waited since BC Day last year for this weekend, and I'm pretty damn excited. And you should be too! Come on down and check out some great beats, and maybe cut some rug while you're out there. The festival is free, and runs from 12 noon to 10:00 PM on Saturday and Sunday - after that there are after parties planned at both Hush and The Jungle Room. And if you see me dancing, come say hey - just don't let me know you're watching!