Intro to Street Dance

Tale about how I got started in this street dance thang. Mainly biting and cloning the popular dancers I saw on tv and the internet.

Transcript available at poplockparables.buzzsprout.com

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Transcript

What's going on? Welcome to Poplock Parables where I tell stories about my adventures in street dance along with any discoveries, histories or lessons that I happen to encounter. Again, this is Episode One. This episode is also transcribed on poplockparables.buzzsprout.com. The first episode will be about my introduction to street dance. Hope y'all enjoy.

When I say what is street dance, I mean yeah, literally, you know dance that's learned on the street, in comparison to dance has been learned in the studio, right? So with your little classical styles, so to speak, such as the ballet, modern, tap, so on and so forth. You tend to learn those in a studio. With with street dances that you learn them, you know, parking lots, people's houses, Parks competitions, it's just a lot of informal learning. And then nowadays, you do have people that teach in studios, but most of them, most of the interactions do occur in informal settings. Onto the story! Now, I've always been an artist, you know, I used to draw a lot as a kid, but that changed to dance around age 10 or something. And it was really, like, four early dance influences. So you have my mom, who it's helped me Okay, you know, we used to do this back in the day or this was called the Roger Rabbit; this was called the running man,  and you could do it like this. You can do it like that. Right?

Of course, I have Michael Jackson, you know, James Brown. You know, seeing them, copying them. You had the local social dances. You know, like, Lean With It, Rock With It, you know, Snap Your Fingers, do the step, you know, all the stuff that was coming out in Atlanta. Right? Soulja Boy, all that, right. And then you had some movies. So yeah, I one in particular, it was Kickin' It Old Skool. You know, Jamie Kennedy. You had Step Up and Stomp The Yard, too, but it was really Kickin' It Old Skool that–that got me into street dance, in particular, breaking, right? Now when I say a breaking, I'm talking about...people know it as breakdancing, bboying, bgirling,  boogie boy, breakin, you know. It comes out of New York. You think about gymnastics. So you have top rock, which is the upper, you know, you're standing up grooving; floor work, which is as it sounds, working on the floor. And then you have power moves, which are like, headspins, windmills, flares, things like that. And then your freezes. Alright.
So Kickin' It Old Skool, you know, I was into breakin–I was into breakin. Watching some stuff on YouTube, trying to learn some foundation, but mostly just whatever I saw. And then when I became a teenager, I started getting into So You Think You Could Dance and America's Best Dance Crew. So these two TV shows were important for me. With So You Think You Could Dance, you had a mixture of different styles. So, you had the ballets, the tap, the contemporary, the modern dancers, and then you had the street dancers as well. And you would have, you know, people in between. And I was just kind of doing whatever. And then with America's Best Dance Crew, it was just straight hip hop, but it was always in crew format, as opposed to individuals. Right. And so with So You Think You Can Dance and America's Best Dance Crew, that's where I turn into a biter, basically. Right? 

So what biting is for those who don't know biting is taking moves, and presenting it as your own right? So you think about it like plagiarizing in school, where they'll teach you to be like, oh, you know, don't take somebody else's words, and try to present it as your own, or you need to come up with your own words, rephrase things, right. All that. So same thing with dance, you know, with dance and biting in dance, that's what you're doing. You're taking somebody moves, and you present them as your own. And this is– biting is seen as bad because in street dance communities there's this emphasis on, you know, a development of your personal style. So when you bite, it's seen as like, it's just unoriginal, it's laziness. You didn't put in the work to try to develop your own thing. You just took somebody else's stuff, right? 

Um, but the thing about biting, just like with plagiarizing, is you need community to know that biting is bad, right? So, with school, if nobody tells you that plagiarizing is bad, then unknowingly or not, you're going to do it. Same thing with dance. People don't tell you that biting is bad, right? If somebody doesn't recognize, "Hey, man, that's somebody else's move," right, you just gone keep doing it because it looks cool to you. "Oh that's cool. I want to be like, the person that I looked at it from, I want to be like them." Right? So you're just gonna keep biting. 

So now the thing about other thing too about community, why I didn't have the community to know why biting was bad was because in school, I was the only dancing kid, right? In middle school, it was like me. It was just me pretty much. And then, and it's not the other kids didn't dance, it was more so that I was the only one that was was known as the quote unquote "dancer" right? Like looking at stuff on Youtube, practicing and stuff like that. And then in high school, I was the only dancing kid for the first two years, and then it was me and this other dude named Nasir the last two years, and that was about it. Right. And then you have that, and then also in high school, the events I did see, they was always far! Right. I was in the southwest part of the city. And so I stayed in Cascade, and events would be like in Duluth. For those who don't know about Atlanta, Duluth is like Gwinnett County. It's like northeast Atlanta. Right? So I didn't even bother asking my parents. I like "man, they not gone take me to Duluth, just for some dance competition. Man, they not gone take me, man." [Laughter]
So, I just never, I just never went to any dance events in high school. Right. So everything I was learning, I just learned off of YouTube, right and watching TV. And so speaking–speaking of that, you know, I was learning off YouTube. And I started learning. Um, I did learn some foundation, right. I would look up  "How To Start Breaking" or "Breaking 101" or whatever, right? And like, "here's how to do a six step. Here's how to do a windmill. Here's how to do that." Right. So the few things I did learn, I learned how to do a six step, I learned how to do a freeze or two, I learned how to do a windmill, finally. Right. But that was about it.
And so, I would learn, you know, I did learn some foundation, but most of what I learned I was just copying other people, or just biting people. So there were certain dancers that in the early 2010s started getting really, really big off of YouTube. Right. You had this group of French dancers called, well a lot of people know them now called Les Twins. And they were hip hop dancers, right? You had them and then in 2013 I got exposed to this crew that was in Atlanta called DragonHouse. Right. And so DragonHouse, they really put dancing to, like, dubstep and UK, like, garage and bass music out of the United Kingdom. Right? Dancing to that stuff. You know, they, they put that on the map. 

And so, in watching DragonHouse, I became a clone. Basically, I watched DragonHouse I'm like, "Oh, that's so cool." And then I became a clone in particular after this one video. So there is a guy, one guy in DragonHouse called Nonstop. His name is Marquese, Marquese Scott. But, you know, his stage name is Nonstop. And he had this video called Pumped Up Kicks, where he was dancing to a dubstep version of the song Pumped Up Kicks by Foster The People. And that video blew up over 300 million views on YouTube. Right. And so I saw that video in 2013, and I said "oh yes it's go time. I gotta get this done I need to learn this. Oh, yeah. Yes, sir. I'm bout to learn that man whole style." [Laughter]

Right. So I became a clone pretty much. Now, what a clone is, in comparison where biters take, you know, moves and present it as their own, clones take it a step further to where they adopt their whole style of dress, and try to move in the same way as, you know, these specific dancers. They dance to the same music that they use in, you know, in videos and battles. Basically, they, you know, clones try to minimize whatever individual identity that they might have in favor of trying to become a representation of their favorite dancer. So with Les Twins, when Les Twins came out, they would wear like baggy skinny jeans. They had these big frizzy afros. They would wear bandanas around their neck. They would have like chains hanging out their pockets. And so you, I didn't notice at the time, but after a certain–when I started getting more involved in the dance scene, and used to have people, we started running into people that were Les Twins clones, that is how you knew. They would come to the battle dressed just like them. Right? They will come to an event dressed just like them. And you would say "Oh, yeah, he bout to, he bout to hit some Les Twins moves." And what do you know? They would hit they Les Twins moves. Because they was clones. 

So for me, I was a DragonHouse clone where I didn't, I didn't copy their style as far as fashion is concerned. The shoes, yes, I took they shoes. Um, but I didn't, I didn't really copy like their fashion. And for me it was more so the movements right. So DragonHouse was known for doing glides, where you know, as it sounds, you glide your foot across the floor, and it makes it look like you're floating. They had, they were known for doing these like vibrations, right? They shake in place. And sometimes they would, like, move with it. You know you had waves, which is as it sounds, you know, waves traveling from one part of your body to another. And then they had, they were really known for doing these things called box tuts–they wuld be now known as box tuts. Um, so, where you have King Tut, which is you have tutting in general as a style, originally known as King Tut. And it was a much wider–think about Egyptian hieroglyphics, right, and it's all spread out in 2D. And people took it in and started doing box tuts, they would, as it sounds, they would make boxes with their hands and with their fingers. Right. And it, you know, gets more complicated from there. But from a from a simple point, that's what they were doing. They was doing these little tuts, the little box tuts, they was gliding, they was vibrating, they was waving, right? And that was they style. 
And so, I started doing all that, right. Now, a quick thing of nuance. Not all biters are clones, and not all clones are biters. For some biters, they just take certain moves and that's it, but they don't copy, like, the whole style. And then some people are clones in the sense that they all look alike in a certain style, but they don't necessarily bite people. Like they might be following a certain tradition, right. To where, the tradition, they're following this tradition so closely, that they all end up looking very, very, very similar to one another. But that's something for another day. 

So I'm a DragonHouse clone. You know, I still use some Les Twins moves, I still might break out a little bit of breaking here and there. I do that, you know, to the end of high school, and I get to college. And I joined my college's dance crew. And the college dance crew was called Phinix (Phoenix) Dance Crew, I believe. And so I'm in the dance crew for about a year. You know, I still use the DragonHouse and Les Twins moves in my performances. So I would watch their videos. I'd freak out. I'd be like, "Oh, man, what was that? Oh, hold on. Oh, that was cool. Whoa!" I would rewind it a whole bunch of times. Practice that one move that they did. And then in my shows, I would do it. Right. And again, I didn't, I didn't know any better even though I was around community now, I still didn't really know. And no one ever told me "aye bro you shouldn't, you shouldn't be taking they moves, that's a Les Twins thing, bro." Or "aye man, that's DragonHouse stuff, you shouldn't–you should try to come up with your own thing." Nobody told me that still. So I was biting and cloning, biting and cloning. Didn't know any better. So, so that happened. I was doing that for about a year. 

And then at the end of the first year (of college), there's a guy named James. James was one of like the leaders in our crew basically. And so James, he sends out this message. I want to say on Facebook. And he's like, "Hey, y'all, you know there's a battle going on this day." I want to say this was like Spring 20...2014. He's like, "Oh, you know, there's a battle going on. If you guys want to experience real street dance culture" and that's not to say that that's we was not doing in the crew was real street dance culture. He was like, you know, "if you want to experience street dance culture, outside of what we do, you know, at the college, you should go to this battle." And it was a real battle in the sense of, you know, it had cash prizes, cash prizes, had judges, right. And it was hosted. 

So I was like, okay, cool. Let's go through, right. So I hit up my best friend, at the time, you know, Terrell. I say, "Hey, man, you know, let's, let's go to the battle, man. Let's get down." He said he wasn't gonna compete, but he was gonna go support. "Okay, cool. Okay, let's go." So, I'm gonna cover the battle next time though, man. Don't want the story to get too long. Appreciate y'all listening. Thank you.

Appreciate y'all listening to Poplock Parable, mane. You could find me, Nick, on Twitter at @PoplockParables. You can also find me on IG at @poplockparables. You know, if you're enjoying it, please subscribe, leave a  review, you know, on iTunes, wherever you happen to be listening from. If you got any questions, you know, random or otherwise that you want me to answer, any topic suggestions, things you want me to talk about, you could write me at poplockparables@gmail.com or reach out on Twitter and IG. Appreciate y'all listening. Thank you. Have a good day.