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Get Down!

August 13th, 2010 1 comment

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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The Geometry of Dance

March 31st, 2009 No comments

FigbyWell, my dance class was postponed this week due to illness, so I don’t have any specifics to write about that as a result.  However, I did get talking to my very good friend Michi, and after he requested that I review his most recent videos and give him some feedback (check out his videos on his site, they’re quite well done), we ended up in a pretty long discussion today about the importance of lines and angles in dancing.

While attempting to explain these concepts to Michi, I realized that I’d never really articulated them before, and was having some difficulty trying to process on the fly.  So that’s where we are, and that’s what this entry is about.  Let’s get started. 

All of this comes with a disclaimer, and that is that these are general rules and guidelines.  Dancing, along with any form of self-expression, has a set of rules that you need to first learn so that you can follow them, and then so that you can bend and break them when it’s appropriate to do so.


So what are they? 

Lines and angles in dancing make up one of the most fundamental aspects of the art form.  For the sake of brevity, we’ll consider the two of them as the geometry of dance.

Whenever you adopt a pose, or perform a specific movement in dancing, your body and limbs form a multitude of lines and angles.  Much like painting, logo design and even architecture, there are specific lines, angles, and curves that our eyes and brain intuitively find more aesthetically pleasing.

Let’s start by considering some of the natural lines and angles that we see daily.  Straight lines (you could also consider this a 180 degree angle if you wanted) are pleasing – they are unbroken, and look clean to our eyes.  Parallel lines are also very pleasing – we can see parallel lines everywhere that we look – either side of a tree, or a lamp-post forms a set of two parallel lines that extend up from the ground and travel upwards.  If you look at the top of an office building, you’ll notice that the roof forms a parallel line with the ground, and with the horizon.  Generally speaking, when we’re popping we want to consider parallel lines first and foremost.

What about angles?  The most pleasing angle, visually, is generally 90 degrees.  This is a strong angle, and is very common in our daily lives.  Whenever you see anything sticking out of the ground, such as a tree or a building, it will generally have its side meet the ground at a 90-degree angle.  Doors are in the shape of a rectangle (four 90-degree angles), as are tables.  Buildings have right angles wherever walls meet each other, or the floor.

You can get a feel for other angles that might be pleasing by diving a 90-degree angle into increments.  If you split the 90-degree angle, you get two 45-degree angles, which are also visually appealing.  You can also split 90-degrees three ways, and end up with a set of three 30-degree angles.  Anything smaller than this, and we’re starting to get into the realm of something that is too small to visually distinguish for most people.

Okay, so we’ve got a rough idea of what lines and angles are.  How do they relate to dancing?

Dancing and Geometry

As I mentioned before, every position and movement that a dancer affects creates a set of lines and angles.  Let’s start with the most basic pose – just standing, not doing anything.  The most obvious line is a vertical one drawn from the dancer’s feet to their head.  The dancer’s arms, resting at their side, form two parallel lines to this first line, drawn from their fingertips up to their shoulders.  Lastly, there are some horizontal lines.  The most obvious is the line drawn from one shoulder to the other – notice that this line is parallel with the line created by the ground (which is the same line as that created by the dancer’s feet).  Slightly less obvious, there is a line drawn from the dancer’s one hand, straight across to his other.  This too is parallel with the line’s created by the shoulder and the feet/ground.

At rest, there are not a large number of angles created by the dancer.  There are the set of two 90-degree angles created where their legs meet the ground.

Here’s the tricky part.  Good angles and lines are a lot like matching a jacket to a pair of pants.  You can get away with matching different but complimenting colors (or a 90-degree angle on one side of your body, and a 45-degree angle on the other), but you really get into trouble when you try to match a jacket that is one shade of grey with a pair of pants that is a slightly different shade of grey.  I call this the law of proximity – you can get away with something when it is not close to a visually distinct line or angle, but when it is close to that line/angle, you need to make sure you’re matching it.  People will find it visually jarring when your dancing is displaying two different lines that are almost parallel, but not quite.  Likewise, if you are creating angles that are close to 90-degrees, but not quite (say 80-85 degrees), it will not look as tight as a nice clean 90-degree angle.

Let’s move forward with an example.  In locking, one of the main techniques is the point.  The idea of the point is that you are pointing out to people in the crowd to get props and cheers.  Generally speaking, you want to ham it up pretty good, and bust out points at people to indicate “Check out how awesome I am”.  In any case, envision a dancer pointing with their arm outstretched, and one finger extended.  There is one line created from their shoulder to their wrist, and a second line created from their wrist to their fingertip.  In most cases, you’re going to want to make sure that these two lines are parallel, so that you can draw a line from your shoulder straight to your finger, and that it will pass directly through your wrist and along your finger.

One more example – one thing I noticed Michi doing often was dropping only one of his shoulders for certain poses.  What happens when he does this?  Trace a line from one shoulder to the other, and you quickly notice that the line created is no longer parallel to the ground, your hips, and your feet.  Naturally you’re going to have situations when you specifically want to drop one shoulder lower than the other (such as during an arm wave), however, for the most part, you want to preserve the symmetry of your shoulders.

Symmetry and Balance

Symmetry and balance are the last aspects of the geometry of dance that we need to consider.  Whenever a dancer assumes a given stance, our brains will automatically parse that stance and be looking for things like symmetries on either side of the dancer (even if you don’t think you do this, trust me – we do it all the time, even for mundane things like determining if we find someone attractive).

Symmetry is a fairly intuitive concept – look at someone adopting a pose, and determine how much their right side matches the left side.  Let’s take an example:

In locking, one of the techniques often used is called pacing.  This technique serves as a foundation movement that allows you to do something while you are trying to think of your next big move.  Pacing is just holding your hands loosely in fist and moving them up and down to the music.  It’s not a complicated action, but it imparts the illusion of movement, and allows you to create a fluid dance that is easy to move in and out
of as you start and finish your more impressive movements.  One of the common forms of pacing is to raise both arms up, bent at the elbows, with your fists loosely balled, and then drop them back down.  A very simple movement.

Good symmetry in this case has:

 

  • Both arms move up and back down at the same speed
  • Both arms reach their apex at the same time, and at the same height
  • Both arms are aligned with your body roughly the same angle for each arm

Breaking just one of these points of symmetry will cause a small amount of visual distress to your viewer.  Breaking more than one of these points of symmetry will generally look less appealing, and make the dance overall feel sloppier and less tight.

You can see some examples of pacing in Michi’s video here:

Michi’s locking is really good, no doubt about it.  However, you can tell at various points throughout the video, if you’re looking for it, that his shoulders lose their symmetry, and at certain points throughout his pacing, his arms lose it as well.  Some people will claim that these are very small levels of detail, but that’s what you need to be aware of if you want to work towards perfection and continual progression.

Balance is a similar notion to symmetry. Symmetry requires that the left and right sides of your body be as close to mirror images of each other as possible.  Balance is a slightly looser concept.  I hesitate to even mention the concept of balance, because of this fact, and you can really get away with breaking balance quite easily.  Either way, a rough explanation of the concept can’t hurt:

Think of the vertical line that we initially drew up from your feet to your head.  Now think of this as your pivot point – anything that you extend outwards from this line, such as an arm for example, creates a change in the balance around this main vertical line.  The farther you extend a body part, the further out of balance the visual you are presenting to your audience becomes.  You don’t always want to present a balanced visual, and breaking this rule can achieve a very strong effect – but, you do want to keep it in mind.  Good rules of thumb are things like avoiding dancing in such a way that you are always breaking balance on one specific side of your body (many new dancers get better with one side of their body than the other, and as a result, fall victim to this practice).

How do I incorporate this into my dancing?

Some people have a natural, intuitive ability to understand and grasp the concept of geometry when dancing.  My friend Graham is fortunate in this respect, and has always just been able to do it.  However, I suspect that he doesn’t devote any thought to this concept, as it comes naturally to him.  I don’t even know if Graham could articulate the concepts if he wanted to, but hey, that’s fine, because they’re all present when he’s dancing.  Michi, on the other hand, has always struggled with creating clean lines and angles when he dances, and it’s a completely foreign concept to him.  He could articulate them after he had thought enough about them, but that is the first step for him.

Unfortunately, the best time to start thinking about lines and angles is right when you first start dancing.  This is unfortunate, because the concepts themselves are actually quite tricky (and if you’ve attempted to follow with me through this entry, you probably agree) and difficult to understand on a deep level until you’ve spent some time dancing.

However, it is possible, when starting out to practice the fundamental moves that make up the style of dance you are interested in, and looking in the mirror to establish how clean your lines and angles look.  If you’ve video taped yourself dancing, review the tape, pause it, and practice visualizing the lines that you are creating.  Ask yourself whether these lines are parallel with the appropriate lines, and if your angles are clean.

When I was trying to explain this concept to Michi, he commented that he had forgotten how anal retentive I am.  He’s right, I am supremely detail oriented and anal retentive.  However, that doesn’t mean that other people aren’t aware of this aspect of dance on a more subconcious level, because they are!  The more time you spend dancing, the more you learn to differentiate between dancers that are good, and dancers that are great – it’s the subtleties that mark this difference.

Conclusion

What a complicated concept.  I wish that I had some formal training in dance theory, or even some ballet classes in my background.  Ballet?  You bet.  Ballet, as a style of dance, is by far one of the most studied and nuanced style out there, and the concept of lines and angles has most certainly arisen from the study of this form of dance.


Any comments for places that I can elaborate on this further would be greatly appreciated – the more questions I can answer, the better my own understanding of these ideas becomes.  Hopefully this entry provides some level of clarity for a fairly poorly understood (or nebulous at best) concept in the urban dance scene.
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Inconsequential Update

March 28th, 2009 2 comments

It’s been a decent while since I’ve blogged.  Every time the spectre of a week passed without blogging raises its head, my mind goes to the many entries I’ve read stating that a good blog needs to be updated regularly.  Unfortunately, I’m just not geared that way.  I can appreciate that people that are paid to write professionally (even if only on a free-lance basis) need to be able to get the machine working and produce, but I don’t enjoy writing when I’m not inspired.

In addition to inspiration, I need time to sit down, think about a concept, and then flesh it out before I can even begin to write about it.  In school I was absolutely one of those students that constantly got frustrated when a teacher taught us the correct way to go about writing an essay (brainstorm, overview, etc. etc.), I would follow that plan and get a poor grade, and then next time whip something up the night before and get a better grade.  Just like that, the negative behaviour was enforced.  Nevertheless, these days, with concepts that I consider reasonably complicated to write about, I find these techniques essential, and am glad that I at least paid attention in class, even if I didn’t implement the lesson being taught at the time.
As far as normal life is concerned, things have been busy (aren’t they always).  Taxes, chores, and taking on any additional extra work that naturally comes out of having a spouse in school full-time have all eaten into my spare time.  No spare time, no time for solitude and contemplation, no time for inspiration, no time for writing.
Beyond the day-to-day things, I’ve taken on a few new things in my spare time.  One of them is pursuing some volunteer work with the group that is putting on the West Coast Music Festival in Whistler this year.  This is a new festival, but one that I’m very excited about and would like to be a part of from the ground up.  I’m also still considering volunteering my time to aid in the management of our local Victoria Electronic Music Festival this summer, and so this is eating up some spare cycles as well.
Lastly, something new has come to fruition that I’ve been waiting on forever.  Last year I briefly took some hiphop dance classes, in the hopes that it would provide some inspiration for the styles of dancing that I really want to keep pursuing, which is popping and locking (and all the other funk styles under those umbrellas).  I liked the hiphop classes, but they weren’t really what I wanted to be learning, and I just wasn’t willing to sacrifice the time to do something I was only tangentially interested in.  However, Brooke (the owner of Vibestreet Dance, and a generally all-around cool girl) sent out a group e-mail recently that mentioned popping classes.  I couldn’t believe it.  I’ve been waiting for over ten years to take a popping class in Victoria.  I’m not exaggerating – our urban dance scene is simply that weak on the island.
The classes start this Monday and will go for 6-7 weeks.  We’ll see how things fare, and if I’m enjoying it, I’ll sign up for more and keep going.
So, this entry has already digressed from my original topic related to work, so we’ll switch this into a general update and I’ll continue on this path.
I invited my friend Graham to join me, but he declined, suggesting that the class would be too basic.  While I think that he’s correct (at least, as far as what he’s willing to devote his time to), I’m comfortable with this fact.  My popping has been self-taught right from the beginning, aside from two workshops that I’ve taken.  The workshops have been fabulous, but you can only learn so much over the course of a day or two, and if there’s one pattern I’ve noticed about progression and improvement, it’s that you will forever be hampered if you don’t start out with the right fundamentals.
I’m hoping that I can learn and crystallize some of the things that I’ve always advocated other people starting out learn, but have never been able to train myself to practice correctly, such as: Fresnos, Twist-o-Flexes, Correct isolation for various pops, and so on.
All of these are extremely important techniques from which you can improvise the rest of your dancing around.  When my friend Michi was initially starting out, I made a point of giving him feedback when he wasn’t correctly carrying out these fundamentals, which in turn let him avoid the same mistakes and bad habits that have become engrained in my own dancing over the years.
My expectation is that I will be both incredibly frustrated, and incredibly enlightened.  The frustration comes from trying to unlearn the bad habits I’ve acquired and replace those with the correct techniques.  The enlightenment will come from the feeling of finally learning how to correctly apply these techniques and then to use them in later dances.
I was thinking this morning about why squash has really taken off for me, but dancing has not.  Dancing has always been a passion of mine, and even when I was in middle school, I had a yearning to learn how to dance, but no idea where I would actually go to take classes (too bad too – what a difference that early start would have made).  The conclusion I’ve come to is that for my interest in dancing to continue and stay strong, I need to find a culture for it.
When I first started dancing and practicing, it was just Graham and I.  We kept this up for a while, but grew weary of it.  Then I discovered raving.  The rave culture has plenty of very valid, very negative connotations associated with it, but the one truly positive one that I found was that good dancing was respected.  Bad dancing was also respected, unfortunately, but there was still an elite group of people that you would see time and again at these parties and that you would recognize and bust out with.
Once I outgrew the rave culture though, there was nothing less to spurn me onwards and keep me going at it.  I can go out to the bars now and then and find good DJ’s to dance to, but there’s nothing inherent in this situation that encourages someone to keep improving.  People at the bar like to see good dancing, but there’s no need for me to improve beyond a certain point – the moves and routines that I was using ten years ago still earn praise, and so there’s nothing driving me forward.
Does this sound silly?  Shouldn’t you do something out of the sheer love you have for it?  Yes, to an extent.  But we are all humans, suffering from interest and passion that waxes and wanes.  Maybe it’s just me, but if I want to keep up with something, I need a culture behind that to support it.
So, that’s the other thing I’m really hoping I can discover with this dance class – a culture of other people that are interested in the same styles that I am, and that will imbue me with a desire to continue progressing.  Will it happen?  I don’t know.  Sometimes these things occur serendipitously, without you being able to force them.  I’m not going to these classes expecting anything other than a starting point and a way to learn the fundamentals.  But, I’m going to keep my eyes open for further opportunities and new sources of inspiration.
Stay tuned – I’ve got at least one more entry planned for this weekend, this time to actually write about what I’ve had on my mind related to HR practices, and Monday night will likely have a new blog entry explaining the first popping class, so that should be an interesting read.
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