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New Freestyle: May 2012

I was due for a new freestyle this month so I decided to enter the KIA Motors Dubstep Contest. Dancers from around the world are asked to use DJ Flux Pavilion’s “I Can’t Stop” and also to use a soccer/football in a short dance video. There were over 250 entries, top 8 get a free trip to Poland for the EURO 2012 soccer tournament and the grand prize is a new car. Pretty sweet deal. I thought it would be a great creative challenge so I invested in a $20 soccer ball and this is what I came up with. Enjoy!

Main reason I did this was to practice creativity. It is an important aspect of popping that can be difficult to teach, and the best way to learn it is to challenge yourself with new ideas and concepts. I had not danced with a ball previously and this challenged me to come up with unique movements with the ball. I’m happy with it.

Top 16 have not yet been announced by KIA motors, but maybe I will even get a trip to Poland out of this, that would be sweet!

Why are there so few female poppers?

If you have ever watched popping videos on YouTube or have been to a popping event, you have certainly noticed that 95% of the people competing are guys. YouTube analytics also says the viewership of my popping videos is about 75% male. However, I have taken popping classes at studios such as Broadway Dance Center in New York City and the beginner classes are ~75% female! Why is this? I think the last example is simply that many females go to the studio for Ballet, Jazz, and Hip hop classes, but then decide to try popping for fun. There are definitely amazingly talented female poppers out there: Pandora, Miss Funk, and Pringlz come to mind just to name a few. (Search them on YouTube!) The list is relatively short in comparison to how many male poppers there are. I have always wondered why this is?

I don’t know the reason, so the following is just a speculation. I plan to get an opinion from a female popper. To help explain, I asked myself a related question: Why is there a similar male/female ratio in breaking? I think in our society there is a notion that guys are supposed to dance tough and girls are supposed to dance smooth. Many girls would rather do ballet, jazz, or modern which is more in line with society thinks is normal. Personally, I think it is very cool when a girl is good at popping, but maybe other people (non dancers) would think differently. Bottom line: I don’t know why, so I will ask a few female poppers and post their thoughts below. For now, here is a recent video I watched of some sick female poppers:

Popping, Fitness, and Muscle Size.

People often email me questions related to fitness and popping, specifically if a large person can be good at it. The answer is yes. Popping is not a dance that requires you to be in top physical shape. The dance is more focused on precision and dope poppers come all different shapes and sizes. There are dozens of very talented and very well known poppers who are on the bigger side. When I get these questions I usually point to Slick Dogg who is a well respected popper and one of the best wavers out there – he is also big guy (I say this in the best of ways). There are also thin guys who are extremely talented such as Kite. The level of fitness doesn’t limit you in popping.

Related to this, beginners assume that to have big hits you need big muscles: wrong. Hitting is about technique and muscle speed. Practicing popping doesn’t make you muscles bigger (if that was the case all poppers would be jacked) but it does make them much faster. Fast and coordinated muscles are responsible for big hits. The bottom line is muscle size is not important, but flexibility on the other hand, can help a lot. A non-flexible neck is usually the reason why someone has trouble learning the head isolation. Flexibility can also help you be more creative with your waves, get cleaner tutting angles, and do bigger boogaloo rolls. Being flexible and in good shape can help prevent injuries. Most street dancers don’t stretch before getting down. I have recently started stretching regularly, and it is helping my dance tremendously.

How Old Do I Need To Be, To Start Popping?

People always ask if it is too late to start popping. Some of these emails I get are from people that at 15 years old or 12 years old. The answer is no! Those ages are perfect and actually give you a head start! Popping is not one of the dance styles parents sign their kids up for when they are 5 years old and take them to classes every week. That is extremely rare and almost unheard of. Most people start in the range of 15-21 years but the spread is huge. I personally started popping when I was 17 years old, although closer to 18. If you start younger you have a definite advantage. There are many old school poppers that pop well into their 40s that can still kill it on the dance floor but the flexibility and agility is often not the same as the younger dancers.

Still, I have people that message about the DVDs that are into their thirties and they end up doing well with the popping. Their goal is not usually to be a pro, just as a new hobby. A good example of a young popper is Baby Bang who got established at only 12 years old. For the older generation, there are too many dope OGs to name them all, but I will mention Mr. Animation who was born in 1966. I recently saw him get down in Santa Monica — too dope. To summarize, if you are younger than 17 you are not too old, you are young for popping and have a huge advantage if you start now!

How long will it take me to be “good?”

The most common question I receive about popping is how long it takes to be “good” at it. The problem is that “good” means something different to everyone. For most beginners, “good” means popping at a dance party to impress your friends and the people surrounding the circle. For others, good means battling other poppers and being respected by them. These two definitions of “good” are on completely different levels. Now the shocker: Your definition of “good” gets higher as you improve so you never really reach it! Here are my two best tips for achieving your quest to be good: Enjoying the journey of improvement, and focus on practice time.

Enjoying the journey of improvement! If you can do this, then you will have fun every day instead of drudging through months of hard practice until one day you hope to magically become “good” (day never comes). If you can enjoy the struggle and the success of making a wave smoother, stopping sharper, or hit harder, then you will have more fun, which translates to you spending more time practicing. More time practicing = faster improvement. I clearly remember not being able to do a simple boogaloo roll and doing it over and over again until I finally got the motion was an amazing feeling of accomplishment. This feeling kept me going. I also vividly remember trying to coordinate breathing with chest hits for weeks before it finally came together. Enjoyed this process of improvement (not being able to do something, working hard, and then noticing the change) kept me motivated. It felt better than chasing after a goal of being “good” like a hamster on an exercise wheel.

Practice time is key. The amount of time you practice is the single biggest factor on how quickly you improve. More practice = faster you improve. I recommend beginners practice for 1 hr a day to see good results. If you wanted to improve twice as fast you could do 2 or more hours a day, but for most people who have school or work, this is simply unrealistic. Let’s compare two people that have both been dancing for one year. Joe practiced once a week for an hour, and Ray practiced every day for an hour. Ray will be 7X better even though they have both been dancing for one year! There are other minor factors such as your previous dance experience (I had zero when I started), but the bottom line is the more practice = faster improvement. You get out of it what you put in. In reality, one hour a week can be tough. Sometimes I would have busy weeks in high school between homework and hockey practice so I would skip popping, but then on the weekend I would practice for 4 or more hours. It averaged out to one hour a day. If you try to be a hero and practice for eight hours per day that could be great, but it simply wouldn’t be fun, and having fun is really important to staying motivated in the beginning stages.

How to Practice Popping Efficiently

You can classify most types of freestyle popping practice into three categories: Technique improvement, Freestyle improvement, and sessions with other dancers. When most beginners practice, they just put on their Ipod and… dance! This is more commonly called “getting down” and it’s very useful for working on musicality, freestyle concepts, linking moves together, and simply having fun, but if you only do this your technique will improve very slowly. The best kind of practice for beginners is technical practice. This is when you are focusing on a specific more or style, look in the mirror, and practice isolations step-by-step, noticing your mistakes and correcting them. This way you are improving the actual moves. If you only do freestyle practice, you risk ingraining your bad habits and incorrect techniques and make them hard to correct. Technical practice is not as fun and can be very frustrating, but it is important for establishing good foundations. For example, if you wanted to improve your tutting don’t just start throwing tuts while freestyling; it will be very sloppy. You need to slow down and work on angles one at a time in a repetitive manner (technical practice). For beginners, the majority of what you do should be technical practice.

The third type of practice is a session with other dancers. This is important because you shouldn’t only do popping in your bedroom; you need to do it with other people! Sessions provide the opportunity to share what you know with others, watch their foundations as a way to correct yours, and get inspired. It is very important that you not copy what anyone else is doing (known as “biting”). Use these sessions as an opportunity to get motivated, especially if you are a competitive person. Nothing in the popping community is more looked down upon than biting, it is the ultimate insult to a popper (blog post coming later on this topic. I started dancing from YouTube and attending New York City PopShop, a weekly practice session, helped me correct my foundations and kept me motivated. Bottom line is you need to do all three: session, freestyle, and technique practice.

Which Popping Style Should You Learn First?

There are two different ways you can approach this. I like to call these the strict method and fun method. First, let us imagine a beginner popping class at a dance studio that uses the strict method. The instructor would start by explaining all of the different muscles groups for hitting, demonstrate, then most of the class would be spent drilling different hits. The second class in the strict method would focus on boogaloo, one of the most important, but hardest styles within popping. Hitting and boogaloo are no doubt key component of popping, but if this is someone’s first ever popping lesson, drilling hitting right off the bat could have them running for the exit and never returning.

The advantages to the strict method is you will know right away if you are cut out for popping or not and you won’t waste your time or money. It also weeds out beginners that are not motivated. The classes would get small very quickly since three quarters of the people would not come back, but a smaller class means more personal attention which can help growth. Is it a good method? It really depends on the person, but for most people it is not the best way. I personally think this method is too intimidating, harsh, and doesn’t let people fall in love with popping.

When I teach popping classes at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the first class is packed with people that have zero dance experience. I think it is important for these complete beginners to have fun and feel the accomplishment of learning something in their first few lessons. This sense of accomplishment will provide them with motivation to learn hitting and boogaloo later on in the lesson series. My first class is always arm and body waves because it is easy. People are genuinely scared of their first dance class, so much so that they bring five friends and the stand to the back of the room.

Teaching waving gets people comfortable and gives them the best chance of walking away with a movement from the first lesson. They become more confident and likely to return for the second lesson, usually gliding since it is also fairly easy. The goal is to ease them into it, and most importantly, give them the best shot of falling in love with popping. Getting them hooked means they are more likely to stick it out through the difficult hitting and boogaoo lessons. My DVDs are structured this way so they get harder as you progress and hitting is taught after waving and robotics. The exact order you learn should really depend on the styles that come easiest to you and the ones you enjoy most. I like to teach waving first because it is the first style I learned and it made me want to learn hitting and get more into popping. I really want to stress that both these methods are good and have advantages and disadvantages.