Electric boogaloo (sometimes mistakenly referred to as electric boogie) is a style of funk dance and hip hop dance closely related to popping. It became the signature style of the dance group started in the 1970s, the Electric Boogaloos. Along with electric boogaloo they also popularized popping and many of its related styles.
It is characterized as a fluid leg-oriented style danced to funkmusic, utilizing rolls of the hips, knees, legs, and head, which was later combined with popping.
Today, boogaloo is often used as a synonym for the electric boogaloo, except in the Bay Area where boogaloo refers to an Oakland creation of street dance that remains to this day.
The Crip Walk, also known as the C-Walk, is a dance move that originated in the early 1970s by Crip gang members from the Compton suburb of Los Angeles, California.
The Clown Walk is a variation of the Crip Walk. Unlike the Crip Walk, the Clown Walk is strictly just a dance, not associated to the Crips whatsoever. The Blood Bounce is an alternative dance performed by the Bloods. These can be abbreviated to Cwalk, causing much confusion as to whether people are Crip Walking or Clown/Crown Walking. Clown and Crown Walk is based on and takes many moves from the original Crip Walk, however it has no gang affiliation and is generally a lot more complex. The main difference between Clown Walk and Crown Walk are that Clown Walkers or "Clowners" tend to be a lot faster and flashier, whereas Crown Walkers or "Crowners" tend be slower and smoother whilst "beatriding" to music, although this is not always the case. Clowners and Crowners can also develop and/or join crews to participate in crew battles and crew tournaments.
Floating, gliding or sliding refers to a group of footwork-oriented dance techniques and styles closely related to popping, which attempt to create the illusion that the dancer's body is floating smoothly across the floor or that the legs are walking while the body travels in unexpected directions. It is most famous for its use by Michael Jackson and his moonwalk (a.k.a. the backslide), but is commonly used in popping with much greater variation.
Gangsta Walking (often referred to as G-Walk , Buckin, Buck Jump , Jookin, Rollin, Reading, Raping, or Choppin) is a street dance that originated in Memphis, Tennessee alongside "Buck" music during the 1990s. The dance has been suspected to be created by a street dancer named “Capital D” - real name Dima Grinevich. In Memphis, in an alley, he decided to display his new idea for crunk dancing, which evolved into the Gangsta Walk. The Gangsta Walk is commonly performed to crunk music due to the particular 'bounce' in the beat and the movement the dancers make to keep with it. Though Gangsta Walking has been around for many years, much of the dance is still exclusive to the city and surrounding areas.
Turf dance is a form of American street dance that originated in Oakland, California. The term is credited to dancer Jeriel Bey, who created it as an acronym for Taking Up Room on the Floor. Because the terms "having fun with it" or "hitting it" (as it was originally known) didn't seem marketable. Turf Dancing originated as a way to describe dances that different 'turfs' from Oakland performed to represent where they were from (the same as 'blocks' or 'sets'). The dance form had its earliest influences in the Oakland Boogaloo movement of the mid-1960s, later developing into a distinctive dance style.
Jerkin' or Jerk is a street dance from Los Angeles. Since 2009, jerkin' has gained fans along the West Coast and is gaining popularity on the East Coast.
The dance itself consists of moving your legs in and out called the "jerk", and doing other moves such as the "reject", "dip", and "pindrop".
House dance is a social dance primarily danced to house music that has roots in the clubs of Chicago and of New York. The main elements of House dance include Footwork, Jacking, and Lofting. House dance is often improvisational in nature and emphasizes on fast and complex foot oriented steps combined with fluid movements in the torso, as well as floor work.
The major source in house dance movement steams directly from the music and the elements within the music such as Jazz, African, Latin, Soul, R&B, Funk, Hip Hop, etc. The other source is the people, the individuals and their characteristics, ethnicities, origin, etc. You have people of all walks of life partying under one roof. Thus you have exchanges of information (body language) house dance is a social dance before these competitions.
In house dancing there is an emphasis on the subtle rhythms and riffs of the music, and the footwork follows them closely. This is one of the main features that distinguishes house dancing from dancing that was done to disco before house emerged and current dancing that is done to electronic dance music as part of the rave culture.
Strobing (also hitting or ticking) is a popping dance technique giving the impression that the dancer is moving within a strobe light setting or a low-framerate movie.
To produce this effect, a dancer will tense his body and take any ordinary movement in conjunction with quick, short stop-and-go movements, i.e, a dancer may make a simple move such as waving to the audience, but in a strobing motion. Mastering strobing requires perfect timing and distance between each movement. Doing the movements in pace with the music will help accomplish this and intensify the illusion of discrete steps.
The Waacking style of street dance traces its roots back to gay and nightclub cultures. In the United States, at gay nightclubs, male performers dressed as women and performed to female songs on stage. Movements of the performers were so creative that it was only a matter of time before Waacking made its way into mainstream nightclubs as a way of the dancefloor, and earned its approval amongst other sexualities, especially in the straight community. Waacking evolved prior to house music's popularity and is considered a house dance since it was popular amongst nightclubs (also known as houses).
Disco music was the perfect vehicle for Waacking, with its driving rhythms and hard beats. In the early 1970s in Los Angeles, dancer Lamont Peterson was one of the first to start using his arms and body to the music. During the mid 1970s club dancers Tinker, Arthur, Andrew, Lonnie Carbajal, Michael Angelo, Billy Starr, Billy Goodson, and Danny Logo took center stage with other dancers, perfecting those synchronized syncopated movements.
Jazz dance is a classification shared by a broad range of dance styles. Before the 1950s, jazz dance referred to dance styles that originated from African American vernacular dance. In the 1950s, a new genre of jazz dance — "modern jazz dance" — emerged, with roots in Caribbean traditional dance. Every individual style of jazz dance has roots traceable to one of these two distinct origins.
Krumping, also spelled Krumpin, is a street dance popularized in the United States that is characterized by free, expressive, exaggerated, and highly energetic movement involving the arms, head, legs, chest, and feet. The youths who started krumping saw the dance as a way for them to escape gang life and "to release anger, aggression and frustration positively, in a non-violent way.
Locking (originally Campbellocking) is a style of funk dance, which is today also associated with hip hop. The name is based on the concept of locking movements, which basically means freezing from a fast movement and "locking" in a certain position, holding that position for a short while and then continuing in the same speed as before. It relies on fast and distinct arm and hand movements combined with more relaxed hips and legs. The movements are generally large and exaggerated, and often very rhythmic and tightly synced with the music. Locking is quite performance oriented, often interacting with the audience by smiling or giving them a high five, and some moves are quite comical in nature. A dancer who performs locking is called a locker. Lockers commonly use a distinctive dress style, such as colorful clothing with stripes and suspenders.
Locking was originally danced to traditional funk music, such as that produced or performed by James Brown. Funk music is still commonly favored by locking dancers, and used by many competitions such as the locking division of Juste Debout. Locking movements create a strong contrast towards the many fast moves that are otherwise performed quite continuously, combined with mime style performance and acting towards the audience and other dancers. Locking includes quite a lot of acrobatics and physically demanding moves, such as landing on one's knees and the split. These moves often require knee protection of the sort.
Popping is a street dance and one of the original funk styles that came from California during the 1960s-70s. It is based on the technique of quickly contracting and relaxing muscles to cause a jerk in the dancer's body, referred to as a pop or a hit. This is done continuously to the rhythm of a song in combination with various movements and poses.
Popping is also used as an umbrella term to refer to a group of closely related illusionary dance styles and techniques that are often integrated with popping to create a more varied performance, such as the robot, waving and tutting. However, it is distinct from breaking and locking, with which popping is often confused. A popping dancer is commonly referred to as a popper. The O.G. of pop and lock, Elvis "Poppa Lock" Frias was the first to lock for 32 hours straight. This is known as the "Frias Freeze".
As one of the earliest funk and street dance style, popping is closely related to hip hop dancing. It is often performed in battles, where participants try to outperform each other in front of a crowd, giving room for improvisation and freestyle moves that are seldom seen in shows and performances, such as interaction with other dancers and spectators. Popping and related styles such as waving and tutting have also been incorporated into the electronica dance scene to some extent, influencing new styles such as liquid and digits and turfing.
Last and not least the examples of popping dance:
Animation - A style and a technique where you imitate film characters being animated by stop motion. The technique of moving rigidly and jerky by tensing muscles and using techniques similar to strobing and the robot to make it appear as if the dancer has been animated frame by frame.
Boogaloo - Boogaloo or boog style is a loose and fluid dance style trying to give the impression of a body lacking bones, partly inspired by animated movies and cartoons. It utilizes circular rolls of various body parts, such as the hips, knees and head, as well as isolation and sectioning, like separating the rib cage from the hip. It also makes heavy use of angles and various steps and transitions to get from one spot to the next.
Miming - Performing techniques of traditional miming to the beat of a song. Most commonly practiced are various movements with the hands as if one could hold onto air and pull their body in any possibly direction. Miming can also be used to allow a popper to tell a story through his or her dance. This style is often used in battles to show the opponent how they can defeat them.
B-boying or breaking, often called "breakdancing", is a style of street dance that originated as a part of hip-hop culture among African American and Latino youths in NYC during the early 1970s. Fast to gain popularity in the media, the dance style also gained popularity worldwide especially in South Korea, France, Russia, Japan, and Brazil.
While extremely diverse in the amount of variation available in the dance, b-boying consists of four primary elements:
toprock,
downrock/ footworks,
power moves,
freezes.
B-boying is typically danced to hip-hop and especially breakbeats, although modern trends allow for much wider varieties of music along certain ranges of tempo and beat patterns.
Dance is a type of art that generally refers to movement of the body, usually rhythmic and to music, performed in many different cultures and used as a form of expression, social interaction or presented in a spiritual or performance setting.
There are many type and genre of dance categories out there, however by refering to the blog's theme I'm only focusing on street dance which I'm going to explain and desribe one by one in the following posts.
