Article : Dance Styles, Part 2

Ok guess Ill start on my 2nd part of the article! :) once again as I said before these articles are purely based on my point of view and open to discussion.

Now that aside, previously we discussed about genre(mainly the music element) and style (the broad headings eg. Krumping, "newschool hiphop", Popping, Bboying). That was the most difficult 2 actually... haha.... substyles and character are slightly easier to understand cuz once you get the idea of where everything falls into place, the whole thing starts to make sense.

-Substyle-

A substyle can be seen as an element of a style that is as unique as the style itself, but yet still being just part of the style.
Sounds confusing??? Ok lets take it from the top again with another example. (sorry if I keep referring to hiphop/popping examples as I am more familiar with them)

Ok so the example will be about popping. This will be the tree that we will be looking at :

Genre : Funk / Funkstyles
Style : Popping
Substyle : Tutting

Ok so we have a funk based dance called popping, with its basic foundations. Then as time passed and people got more inspiration, they decided to try new stuff and some of these "experiments" developed into their own sorta "style" which becomes the substyle. (I said "style" so not to confuse with our definitions).

Lets say in our example, tutting was inspired by the egyptian hieroglyphics and their drawings. It encompasses of using your arms and body parts and making 90 degree angles. This substyle was then put into the style popping.

So people started dancing with tutting substyle, but still with the foundations of popping because popping is the main style that this substyle(tutting) came from. Even though a substyle may contribute to even about 80% of the dance itself, the foundation is still from its style>genre. For example if you are a dancer who is tutting to trance music, then there would be a new tree being formed under the Trance genre called tutting, rather than you still being under the funk>popping>tutting tree.

I think almost everyone who dances has at least a substyle. It is still possible to dance purely to the main style, but then again its like saying you want to learn how to draw art but you dont want a wider range of crayons.

Ok now that substyles are more or less explained, I will talk about character.

-Character-

This is the most personal bit of dance and everyone has their own unique character. Even if we were dancing the same genre, same style , same substyle, the character is what sets us apart.

The basic roots to dancing again is about feeling the music. So character will show when you just feel the music. Imagine you forgot all the technicalities of dance. And you just hear a song. You groove to it, and some people may feel happy while listening to a song, others may feel sad while listening to the same song. Thus that is what character is. Its your own intepretation of the music and the song. Throw in technique and you get a "dancer" dancer.

If you are naturally a happy person, then when you dance your character will come out. It will show in the type of dance you dance or the way you dance. This is most obvious in freestlye as freestyling allows for the most self-expression. It is still evident in choreo situations as you tend to subconciously input ure own feel into other people's steps ( maybe thats why its so hard to cleanup the steps for choreos when everyone's feel eg character are different).

Yup so to end it off, its always good to have your own character and develop it. We dance to express so that is the ultimate level. Be yourself and not a copy of another person. It is good to copy sometimes to learn, but to Learn, not to BE. We should copy to improve technique and learn ideas but we should never copy and claim is as our own. Only we ourselves can be our own judges. As a dancer it is always good to spend time to think and reflect on what genre/style/substyle you are dancing and know its roots.

Freestyle is another important part of any dancer. I will talk more about that in the next article! Till then hope this helps you guys get a bigger view of the picture :)

-^_^arC