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I’m so exhausted that I can barely focus.  My hips are killing me.  My hands are hurt from giving high-fives to someone else for 30 minutes straight.  I can’t stop smiling.

These are all symptoms of the fact that Get Down 2010 is currently ongoing in Vancouver, and I’ve just finished the second day of three days that I’ll be attending workshops.  As the preceding paragraph suggests, the workshop is a deeply rewarding experience, and the opportunity to dance with the some of the founders of the funk styles that I dance and teach is a rare treat.

I cannot go into too much depth, because I just don’t have the energy right now.  That’s not a complaint – it feels incredible to leave everything you have on the dance floor at the end of the day.  I do, however, want to capture some of what we’ve learned today.

One of the first things you learn training with the creators is that dancing is a social activity.  Before there was popping, before there was locking, before there was hiphop, there were people getting together and dancing.  Social dances have evolved as time has gone on because they allow people to get together and share in a groove.  It gives you an opportunity to mutually experience the physicality of music with someone, and that is an amazing feeling.

Social dances aren’t a style – they’re just dancing.  While any one particular social dance (eg, the Bart Simpson*) can be attributed to the genre that inspired it, there’s nothing stopping someone from taking that social dance and interpreting it to a different style of music.

*yes, there is a social dance called the Bart Simpson, and yes, it is awesome.

The more I dance with the originators, the more I see how much influence this social aspect of dancing has, and by that virtue, how much influence social dances have had.  You see them everywhere.

My theory is that these dances teach you how to move a certain way with your body.  Think of them as little programs that you can install into Neo’s brain in the Matrix (“I know how to move my hips this way now Morpheus!”).  Once you’ve learned a particular social dance, that movement becomes inherent to you, and it starts to influence and inspire the rest of the way you dance.

Anyhow, enough about this epiphany I’m having, I want to document the social dances that Sugarpop and Lockadelic taught us today, and you want to hear their silly (awesome) names:

• The Stevie Lock

Throw away your ab machines, this dance is the new way to blast your abs.  Sitting up and down has never been such an ordeal.  I imagine that Sugarpop has abs that can stop bullets based on the ease with which he can move his body and perform this dance.

• The Texas Hop

I told you right – dope names!  After breaking down the parts of this dance for us, Sugarpop lined us up and had us do a Soul Train line.  Class cut down the middle, and everyone repeatedly does part of the dance.  The two people at the end then do the full social dance down the line, then join the line at the bottom.  I’m sure that this may sound intimidating to a lot of people (myself included!), but the truth is that after standing in that line, surrounded by people doing the same simple part of the dance as you, enjoying the same groove that you are, it feels completely natural to just let it out and bust your way down.

• Cha-cha-cha

Sugarpop and Lockadelic had awesome synergy together, and I’m really glad that I got the opportunity to take the classes today with both of them teaching.  Sugarpop handed over the reins to Lockadelic this afternoon, who taught us this funky dance.  Once we’d learned it?  Back to the Soul Train line!  This time, instead of going down the line, two at a time, we went back and forth across the line with whoever was in front of us.  Again, it may sound intimidating, but when you’re in that groove with someone, you learn so much faster.  Sharing that moment is what dancing is about!

• The Funky Chicken

One of things that I really appreciated about Lockadelic was that she would teach us a social dance, and then we would just spend time moving around in it.  I never realized what the Funky Chicken actually looks like; it’s not the dance done at weddings, although this is a perfect example of a social dance.  And hey, we all have fun doing that right?

Unfortunately, I can feel my concentration losing, and the desire to play video games and let my mind regenerate is overwhelming.  I will sign-off on that note, but there’s certainly more to come – the challenge during this week is always absorbing and recalling as much knowledge as possible!

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I’m still here, there just hasn’t been much recently inspiring me to write.  In the meantime, here are some excellent dance videos to entertain yourself with:

• Crazy Scandinavian’s

These guys may look goofy, but they’ve definitely put some work into their isolations.  Although I think there’s room for them to work on their technique, this video’s giving me a few ideas for what I’ll go over next drop-in class.

• Hilty and Bosch, Featuring Co-Thkoo

This is an excellent video to see the difference between popping and locking.  Most people that don’t have any experience with the different styles think that they are the same thing.  Locking is actually the older dance (and was created before hiphop, breaking, and popping), and is based more on funkiness and a limited move set.  The guys wearing black shirts are two of my favorite lockers from Japan (a country with a lot of incredible lockers). 

The guys in the white vests are performing popping.  You can tell the difference if you look closely.  The poppers movements are punctuated with sharp hits, and are generally more angular in appearance.  The lockers movements are defined by faster movements with more flair and funk.  Wrist rolls, arm rolls, knee drops, and and points are all some of the locking techniques to look out for.

One very cool thing that my friend Jesse pointed out in this video is the symmetry of the choreography.  Although the two dance styles are often quite disimilar, the choreography that these guys are doing has been put together such that one group of dancers will perform a movement, and then the next group will perform similar movements and angles, but using the techniques associated with their respective styles.

• JRock and Pandora, Tutting

This is a very coo
l routine showing the technique of tutting.  You can tell just from the YouTube preview what the general idea is: assume geometric shapes with your body and arms that are reminiscent of egyptian hieroglyphics, and the way Bugs Bunny used to move when he would mimic egyptians in those corny cartoons.

This routine is especially cool because they’ve choreographed it to use two people.  However, this isn’t a necessary aspect of tutting, and it works just as well (well, maybe not quite as striking, but still cool) with one person.

Tutting is a technique that I have only been working on for about two months, as I was always averse to trying to learn it because of the problem I had getting my wrist to make some of the angles.  While you can train your wrist by stretching it out each day, you can also eliminate the need to hit certain angles through creativity.

• Poppin’ John

An excellent video submitted by Poppin’ John for Mr. Wiggles internet video contest (correct me if I’m wrong).  Poppin’ John does awesome things with waves, and is always frustrating for me to watch and try to fathom how the hell he’s come up with his vocabulary.

I especially like his technique of putting one hand over the back of his head, and then using that hand to push waves down and out his other arm.  Very cool.

Anyhow, that’s all I’ve got for today.  If any of these videos or techniques interest you and you’d like to learn more, come check out one of my classes at Vibestreet Dance.  The techniques look complicated, but with practice, you can master them and trip out your friends too!  Seriously though, popping is an awesome style of dance to learn, and a ton of fun to play around with.  It’s never too late to learn..

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Last night, I took the second popping workshop I’ve been aware of ever being offered in Victoria.  While I know that there have been other workshops offered between this one and the last one I took (Jake Evans, from Nova Scotia, about three years ago), these are the only two that I have been aware of.  This is an indication (to me), that there is a real lack of means to get in touch with other dancers, and the Victoria hiphop community in general, and share this kind of thing.

After meeting and talking, last night, with other people that are passionate about popping in Victoria, I feel that I have at least one small purpose to contribute towards our small but growing hiphop community, and that is to help the network grow.  But enough about that, let’s talk about the workshop.

The Groovy G’s

The workshop was taught by two members of the Groovy G’s, a popping crew based out of Vancouver.  The first time I heard about the Groovy G’s was when I started searching the net for popping classes being taught in Vancouver.  I wanted popping lessons, but since we didn’t have any classes in Victoria at the time, my only option was to head over to Vancouver.  I talked briefly with Jamieson, one of the two guys that taught the classes, but aside from subscribing to their blog, things didn’t get much further (I really wanted to take classes, but that didn’t change the fact that the only thing in my wallet was a gaping hole – it’s not cheap to take repeated trips to Vancouver).

I actually heard about last night’s workshop in a very round-about manner.  The Groovy G’s posted a note about a funk theory workshop that they had just finished giving.  “Whoa”, I thought, “I could easily make it over for one day-long workshop, provided I budgeted for it”.  I wrote the G’s to ask them if they could give me some advance notice the next time they were planning something like this, and whether or not they would be having another one any time soon.  From there, things just exploded.  Hector (I believe), wrote me back to let me know that Jamieson and Trevor were apparently teaching a workshop in Victoria in a few weeks.  I added Trevor and Jamieson on Facebook, started talking to the people over here that were putting on the event, and couldn’t believe that I almost missed this.

Arrival

Brooke managed to drum up some good interest, and a number of familiar (and friendly) faces showed up at the workshop with us, including Jo, Guillaume, Vincent, Sean, Jack, and Max.  As soon as we entered the studio, I recognized one guy from VEMF last year that Graham and I had seen tutting, and a few people I’d seen on the ol’ Facebook.

It’s funny to see that a dance workshop is really no different from any other kind of culture.  As soon as we sat down,I commented to Brooke that there were three evident cliques: The Vibestreet Dance clique, the Boston Dance Company clique, and ..  one more (which I didn’t know enough about to provide a label).  It’s not that any of us are elitists or anything like that – it’s just human nature to be apprehensive when in new social settings.

Cody Campbell had put some music on so I practiced a little bit with the kids while we waited.  The mood was very much that of everyone sussing each other out.  “Who’s that over there?”, “Hmm, I wonder if that guy’s a good dancer”, “Hmm, don’t know them”, etc.  Brooke pointed out various people that were prominent in our small but growing dance community and then it was time to start.

Intros

After we paid and I met some of the people I’d been chatting with on Facebook, Liz came out and did a quick intro of the two guys that were teaching us: Jamieson de Guzman and Trevor Chung.  I had talked to Liz over e-mail a few weeks prior, and she was awesome.  Super passionate, and really keen to help hiphop grow here in Victoria.

Once we got past the intros, Jamieson talked a bit about what popping is, and how it relates to dancing.  I’ve heard this many times before, and always attempt to imbue the same thing in my own students, but it’s always good to have it repeated and internalized.  Time to start!

Popping

The first hour of the workshop, we spent on popping.  It’s always interesting to attend different workshops with different instructors, as they have different fundamentals that they are teaching, and different approaches.  Jamieson stressed that three things you should work to pop are your arms, your legs, and your neck (yup, your neck).  Personally, I think that popping your chest and tightening your abs is also important and will further the power of your hits.  It could be that Jamieson was just providing the basic building blocks, and those last two sets of muscles can be added in later.

We drilled the basics for a while, focusing on the fresno, and mixing it up between singles and doubles (shift your weight on every beat, or every second beat).  Some people get impatient revisiting their foundation like this, but I can never get enough, and I was content to take it as an opportunity to tighten things up.  I actually felt pretty good about my hits from these basic positions – the work I’ve been putting in has helped keep things clean and tight.

I noticed things started to fall apart when we started moving into positions that I haven’t trained at all.  Getting my legs to hit when I’m in poses that are new is quite difficult when I don’t yet have the muscle memory in place.  Jamieson let us know that the general rule to follow was that you pop whichever leg has the most weight on it, and whichever leg you can straighten most easily.  That’s a good general rule to have, but I still need to practice hits in various positions, like during walkouts.

As we went through the choreography, one move I had never seen before came up, called the popcorn.  You do the following:

1. Raise up one leg and hit
2. Lower your leg in front of you, place your weight on it, and raise your back leg (essentially taking half a step forward).  Hit.
3. Reverse the motion you just did so that you are now in the same position as in 1, and hit.
4. Put your feet back together, and hit.

Pretty simple really, but it creates a neat visual that I haven’t seen broken down before.  I quickly realized that I needed to work on hits when I’m balanced on one leg – these are especially challenging, and the illusion is instantly broken if you don’t maintain your balance throughout.

Likewise, while practicing walkouts, I realized that although I’ve drilled the movement, I haven’t touched on actually hitting throughout it.  Another thing to work on…

Tutting

After Jamieson finished, Trevor took over the class, and we started focusing on tutting and waving.  The segment related to tutting was actually quite short.  Trevor mentioned the basics of tutting, although he didn’t get as explicit as I would have (which is cool, all teachers are different) about what makes a tight angle, and things to watch out for.  He did only have so much time though, so it’s possible he was just trying to cram as much in as he could.

Trevor showed us a bit about how he practiced (come up with a set of angles and transitions, and then drill that set), and went over some basic poses (like prayer stance).  After that, Trevor went through two different routines with us, and included some footwork.  I’ve been feeling pretty good about my tuts lately, as I’ve been working a fair bit on developing the discipline and mus
cle memory to keep clean angles.  The footwork was brand new to me though, and I had to keep myself from falling right over a couple of times.

Waving

After tutting we moved on to waving.  I’ve been putting a lot of work into waves lately, and I’m pretty happy with the progress.  There’s infinitely more room for progress, but at least I’m seeing some changes that I’m happy with.  Trevor went over the details of what makes a good wave versus a bad wave, and what it is that leads towards an aesthetically-pleasing wave (the secret is that wherever the wave is not, remains stationary.  This is the real key to a good wave).

I noticed that the one thing Trevor did not teach was the isolations of a wave.  His approach was more intuitive than mine, using techniques like visualizing the path that your hands and arms are taking, imagining there is a bar that your hands are travelling over, and so forth.  I made a mental note to incorporate these kinds of visual metaphors in my teaching as well, so that both types of learners can benefit.

Trevor provided some names for a few types of waves that I’ve been working on lately, but haven’t had a name for them.  The main one was a track wave, wherein you move your hands and arms as though they are travelling along a rollercoaster track (or any kind of path really).  Once you’ve done this, you can reverse the wave and travel back in the opposite direction – the key is that you travel back along the same imaginary path.

One of the most helpful ideas that Trevor put in my head was the notion of setting up a specific geometry with your body, and then waving within that geometry.  Eg, put your arms up in some kind of shape.  Then, run a wave through that shape.  Think about the way a wave might travel through that geometry, and mimic this path.  The example Trevor provided in class was holding your arms out in front of you, with your right arm pointing straight up, and your left arm held out so that it is parallel to the ground, with its fingertips touching the elbow of your right arm.  In this position, a wave will travel:

• Down from the fingertips of your right arm to your elbow
• From your right arm’s elbow through to the fingertips of your left arm
• From the fingertips of your left arm up to your left shoulder
• From your left shoulder, through your head/chest, to your right shoulder
• Out your right shoulder, to your elbow, then back up and out the fingertips of your right arm

It’s not necessarily complicated, but setting up various positions like these and then waving through them is part of how you turn waving from a simple technique into an actual dance that you can innovate and improvise using.

Putting it all together

The last hour of the class was devoted towards putting everything we’d learned together into a set of choreography that Jamieson and Trevor made up on the spot as we went along. Before we started this though, we drilled our hits a bit by doing something Jamieson called “copy cat”.

Copy cat is fairly easy – the leader starts by taking a pose and hitting on it for four beats.  Then the class does the same thing.  Then the leader takes a new pose, and the class then repeats that pose. It’s not complicated (but then, most of this stuff isn’t – it just requires dedication), but it’s a great way to work with the class.  Ironically, I’d been planning something very similar out in my head for when our classes start again in Fall, so it was really nice to see that this is a valid approach that works well.

Once we’d finished this, we got going on actual choreography.  I struggled a bit with this, as I have some difficulty remembering all of the parts of choreography when you’re putting it together quickly.  I was definitely getting frustrated by the end of the class.

The other thing that I would have liked a little more would have been to spend more time on some of the additional techniques that they were including in the choreography.  We ended up including some techniques like boogaloo that I would definitely have appreciated getting more time to work on.  But that’s the way things go when you only have three short hours to work with a group of people.

Boston Pizza

Take-aways

So, what did I take away from the experience?  I learned a good deal about teaching and some exercises and techniques that can be used, and I definitely picked up some new moves to practice on.

One thing that was interesting was talking to the other people that were in the workshop, afterwards.  My friend Jo mentioned that she found Trevor’s more visual and intuitive approach easier to work with.  So rather than breaking up an arm wave into the various isolations, just visualize your hands travelling up, over, and around a metal bar.

Unlike some of the classes I’ve had, most of the knowledge that I gained from these three hours came from taking what we were shown during workshop and reflecting on it.  I’m cool with that – I love spending time reflecting about new knowledge, and figuring out where it fits into my existing understanding of the way things work.

All in all this was a really great workshop and I’m really glad to see these kind of things happening in Victoria.  I came away with a few new friends, some more ideas to work towards, and inspiration.

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A Border Collie With Nothing to Do

I’ve been off of the squash courts for just shy of a month now.  I’m meeting up with Rob to do some light training for the first time in what feels like ever, so I anticipate some frustration due to seeing the skill I trained so hard this Winter to acquire slipping through my fingers.

Not playing squash has been very frustrating, as I really love the sport, and I do things because I want to improve.  Being removed from that element means that I have to watch that improvement slip away and a heap of rust develop in place of the game I’m used to having at my disposal.  It’s especially hard because I trained very hard this Winter and Spring, and really felt like I’d reached a new level in my game.  Oh well – all things come to pass, and it is the fool that doesn’t listen to what their body is telling them.

In order to avoid going completely bucknuts-mental, I’ve been spending most of my time biking, working out, and dancing, in order to stay in shape and keep myself occupied (ever seen a border collie without anything to do?  That’s a pretty good analogy to the way I operate).  Additionally, for the previous three weeks, I’ve had access to the dance studio whenever needed, which makes the act of practicing vastly superior to my other options.

About eight years ago, near the very start of my degree, I took it upon myself to practice dancing for thirty minutes everyday.  Even before that, Graham and I would practice whenever the whim struck us.  Lately, I’ve had more motivation than ever before to get down and actually put in some serious practice time, but as soon as I started, I noticed that my practices felt very unstructured.  I would skim from technique to technique, getting distracted and never spending enough time on any one thing.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it’s an indication that there are a lot of ideas that I have in my head that can legitimately evolve into dance moves and techniques.  However, if I want to see and feel real improvement, it’s important to be able to focus when I set out to practice.  More for the sake of posterity than anything else, here is the practice routine that I came up with, along with a few notes describing why each part is there.

Routine vs Innovation

Before I go further, I think it’s important to mention that routine and innovation are both important in any practice regimen.  Innovation is an opportunity to let yourself do whatever your body and the music are telling you to do, and is where you’re going to find the most creativity.  Routine is where you will practice the fundamental movements that are core to the style of dance that you are pursuing (or even any activity in particular – scales for a piano player, for example).  Routine provides you with a solid set of fundamentals upon which you are able to actually create and innovate.  A good dancer needs to have a significant amount of both of these elements, so be sure not to neglect either of them when practicing.

Brainstorming

Before starting to plan out my routine, I wanted to do a braindump and get everything in my head out onto paper.  There’s no magic to this technique – you just sit down with a pencil and paper, and write.  Don’t question anything, just write.  After you’ve sat there for three or four minutes without writing anything, you can be reasonably assured that you’ve gotten everything immediate down.

The results of my brainstorm look like this:

• Waving
• Tutting
• Popping
• Fresno
• Choreography
• Glides
• Floats
• Flexes
• Foundations
• Experiments

So, there’s nothing particularly groundbreaking here, but I have an idea of the kind of stuff that I want to fit in to a standard ninety minute practice session.

Note also that I wrote down Experiments.  This is the placeholder for setting aside some time specifically to work on experimentation.  Not practicing anything in particular, probably just ten minutes or so doing whatever.  I may end up hating everything that I come up with in those ten minutes, but, on the other hand, I may discover a new type of movement that I hadn’t considered before.

Practice Routine

The total amount of time I felt was reasonable for practicing was around ninety minutes.  Anything more and I’m devoting more time than I have available.  Anything less and I really don’t give myself much time to innovate.  When I first started practicing, I figured that it would be a stretch to get through forty-five minutes, however, once I actually force myself to overcome the inertia and actually get started, time seems to fly by pretty quickly.

So, what do I have planned?

• Fresno and Variations (15 minutes)

This one is a natural starting place.  The Fresno is the technique upon which everything else in popping builds, and is the starting point for the dance itself.  Practicing the Fresno provides the opportunity to practice good isolation, good hits, getting funky, and being creative.  No matter how good I get, I will always be able to practice the Fresno, come up with new variations and tightening it up.

Some specifics I want to practice are:

• Tight, crisp hits and isolations
• Walkouts
• Broken walks and hits into and out of the Fresno
• Transitions from the Fresno into other techniques (waves, tuts, etc.)

• Tutting (15 minutes)

Tutting is the newest technique I’ve worked on, and as such, there is a lot of room for me to improve.  I need to practice not only transitions to and from various poses, but also just making the poses themselves clean and tight.  Nothing looks worse than going into a box stance and having the box look more like a shitty oval.  Don’t settle for a shitty oval.  Go for a nice clean box!

Specifics I need to work on:

• Tightening up poses
• New poses
• Transitions to and from various poses
• Footwork throughout

(I have learned most of my tutting so far without footwork, but you’re not dancing if you’re only moving half of your body – I need to work on this)

• Waves (15 minutes)

Waving is one of the trickier techniques for me, in terms of practice.  I have a fairly good grasp of the fundamental concepts for good waves, and I’ve practiced arm and body waves quite a bit.  However, I feel that I’m really letting myself down when it comes to actually being innovative with waving, and having a deeper understanding of the techniques.

For example, I know enough about waving to be able to use it when I’m freestyling, sending a wave up from my feet through my body and out my arms, but that’s as far as it goes.  I’ve never taken the time to sit down and practice sending waves in specific directions, or as specific transitions.

So, that’s part of what I’m aiming to do here.  Some specifics:

• Foundations (practice the individual isolations)
• Body wave (focus on isolating the hips)
• Waves through my legs and feet
• Waving into and out of various poses (eg, into King Tut pose), and transitions from waves to various other techniques
• Kick wave
• One-sided body waves (wave travels only down one side of the body)
• Variations on Phil Chbeeb’s wave (view here at 34 seconds)

• Glides and Floats (15 minutes)

I’ve never really put enough time into learning to glide well.  Part of that is because until recently, my practice sessions have been exclusively on carpet, arguably the worst surface to practice gliding on.  They’re also been inside, which means I can’t practice with shoes on, which makes it that much harder (less support for the toes).

Gliding is a very frustrating and tedious technique to work on.  Having the correct floor and footwear makes things a little easier.  Specific things I intend to work on:

• Sideglide (specifically from left to right)
• Basic float (the foundation for most gliding)
• Snake glide
• Box glide (but work on side glide first)
• Forward glide
• Stationary glide

Nothing much to elaborate on here.  Gliding is the technique I’d like to see the most progression on – there’s a lot of stuff I could be doing that I don’t because I’ve never focused on this technique.

• Flexes (15 minutes)

Flexes are a technique that I never really learned properly the first time around.  After Dillon covered them in one of our classes, it dawned on me how valuable it was to correctly learn these fundamental ways of segmenting and turning your body.  A twist-o-flex may not look astonishing when done at normal speed, but the foundation can fit in with almost everything else that you do.

Specific flexes I want to work on:

• Standard twist-o-flex (with 4 pivots)
• Twist-o-flex with 5 pivots (add an additional head pivot in)
• Twist-o-flex shown here at 4:50 (thanks Guillaume!)
• Neck-o-flex
• Master-flex (I need knee pads to work on this one)
• Standard twist-o-flex, done backwards.

• Choreography (15 minutes)

Although choreography could technically fall as a sub-item into each of the above categories, I made a point of devoting at least 15 minutes in my routine purely to practicing this skill.  If I don’t, I end up spending all of my time working on fundamental movements.  It’s never a bad thing to have a really strong foundation (and there’s ALWAYS things that I can find that need improving), but the only way to improve at choreography (and realistically, a complete dancer) is to spend some time working specifically on this skill.

One of the things that I’ve been working to appreciate is that choreography doesn’t need to be something complicated. It can be as simple as putting together some Fresno movement, and then sending a wave through my arms, down one side of my body, up the other, and lastly, out my other arm.  This isn’t difficult choreography, but until I actually put it together and practice the sequence, it will never be as tight as it needs to be.  And therein lies a small part of why choreography matters to me.  Freestyling, to me, is the opportunity is to make use of anything that I have come up with in the past.  Choreography is the opportunity to tread new ground.  Once I’ve done that enough, it can become part of my freestyling repertoire, but not until.

Specific things I want to work on:

• Various routines from the Fresno
• Waving choreography
• Tutting choreography
• Some choreography including glides
• Some choreography including footwork for both tuts and waves

So that’s basically my practice routine for the summer.  If I get tired of working on things in this manner, I can always mix it u
p and change.  That is the power of my mind – look upon its works and despair!

I’m attending a popping workshop here in Victoria put on the Groovy Gs (of Vancouver) this coming Saturday.  I’ll definitely have some thoughts to post at that point, so check back soon.

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It’s been a little longer than normal since my last entry.  That’s mostly because I’ve been keeping myself fairly busy.  The stuff that is keeping me busy is stuff that I don’t really want to set down only to come home and spend even more time writing about (don’t get me wrong – I’m extremely passionate about dancing, I just haven’t felt inclined to write about it lately), and I haven’t really felt inspired to write beyond that.

However, this Saturday was the end-of-year wrap-up for Vibestreet Dance, and so it seems a good time to reflect a little bit on how things have gone.  When I look back to only two months ago, when I first started taking popping classes from Dillon, I can barely fathom how much things have changed.

The Show

Before I talk about my own thoughts, it’s probably worth talking about our end-of-year show.  Three weeks before the show, Brooke mentioned that our breaking instructor would be putting together a routine for it, and it would be great if I could as well.  This would pretty much be the first time I’d ever done any choreography, so I was a little bit nervous – I spent about a week putting things together, and then went over it with the class.

I also bumped in to two other guys that had been popping for about a year as well, got them out into one of our cyphers, and then got their information and told them to come out to the jam sessions I’m trying to get going.  All in all, the show was awesome.

Instruction

The biggest change that has occurred since starting at Vibestreet has obviously been that I’ve moved into the role of teaching, from that of a student.  Teaching is something that I’ve always wanted to do, and that I’ve always enjoyed.  My own experience has been that teaching people the art that I am interested in is one of the best ways for me to gain a better understanding of it myself.  Breaking techniques down requires thinking about each part of the technique and understanding it at a very fundamental level.  I’ve always felt this way, and indeed, studying calculus with friends in University, I always appreciated being asked for help with various questions.  My friends would apologize for bugging me with another question, but I was secretly being selfish and gaining from the questions they were asking me.

Back in the very early days of the world wide web, a friend and I ran a dance website called “Shaddup and Dance”.  It was a piece of garbage, and would make web browsers explode from having to render the sheer ugliness of colours that we jammed onto that page.  Not only that, but there was also negative feedback from the original gangsters that took exception to my tutorial videos (many of them were indeed quite poor), or our attitude that just because you’d been around for a while didn’t mean that you were above critique.  Still, there was an awful lot of positive feedback that accompanied the negative, and the opportunity to provide some advice and direction to other dancers that were attempting to learn the same techniques I had was one that I relished.

The first day that I started teaching was with the junior class.  I hadn’t met any of the kids before, and I had no idea what they had learned up to that point.  Brooke told me that they were passionate about popping, which was promising, but I didn’t realize how accurate she was.  These kids have been awesome, and really stuck it out with me.  They were patient with my fumbling starts, and have given me lots of inadvertent advice that I have taken to heart.  The opportunity to work with them (and hopefully to continue to do so), has been really great and has provided ample opportunities to learn myself.

Working with the adults has been slightly easier, though no less of a learning experience.  It’s been easier because adults are generally more willing to focus on the foundation, and because I had the benefit of being attending the four classes previous to my taking it over.

When Brooke asked if I wanted to keep teaching, I didn’t even have to think about the answer.

Choreography

I’ll be posting updates as we move further into the Summer.  Until then, stay tuned!

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Fortunately, I had a super productive night at Steve’s place, practicing dancing while Graham and Steve played video games.  The night was so productive that I actually ended up with 7 pages of dance notes.  Although these notes contain a fair deal of shorthand, I thought it would make for an interesting blog entry to replicate those notes here (naturally a scanned them in after getting home, as I try to move away from having any straggling paper as much as possible), and go over them, explaining some of my methodology behind how I took the notes, what I was thinking, and how I capture stuff onto paper.  Even if you don’t care about dancing, it may be interesting to see the process by which I go from capturing a visual thought (dancing is highly visual) into paper, and then into the digital world.

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