Hip Hop styles n°2 Popping (and some more that originated from it aka tetris, waving, robot boogaloo...)

 

Hello charlie.

I think it’s about time I make a second one of these. This time, we’ll look at another one of the old styles and with their long standing presence, are filled with sub-styles.

Today we’ll look at

Popping

So… what’s popping?

Popping is reminiscent of the rise of heavy bass music. In popping what give it its name is the brief contraction of muscle to give the effect of a sort of POP. It’s also sometimes called a tick or a hit.

<-- here is a pop

 Here what makes a good pop dancer is control of one’s body, being able to twitch fast, strongly, dissociate at will every single muscle and contract exactly what you want.

In this style, everything works in poses, on beat you pop to draw attention to a part of the body or your pose in general.

Before showing anymore of popping we need to talk about another style that is often combined with it. These 2 styles are so often combined that in multiple competition they are considered as one.

And this style is…

 *drumroll* 

Waving!

Just like in the name you make waves with your body, this style is kind of the opposite of popping, focusing on motions of your general body flowing constantly the energy throughout your body.

 

However, what is common between the two is their focus on the control of oneself, people that do waving need to be able to dissociate every articulation to make their waves flow, what body part connects to what body part to accentuate your movement, and also the control of the intensity or the variation in the intensity of the wave.

 

Now let’s look at what makes popping great. (at least in my book)

With these gifs it’s difficult to find where it is beautiful or at least it doesn’t seem all that good. But first you need to consider how difficult it is to make it look good, because just twitching on beat might seem easy, and it is, but it’s difficult to make it look great, and that demands a very precise control.

With this one more than any other style I advise you to watch battles or choreography because you will see how much corresponding to the music is part of this dance. That’s what we call musicality, how much a dancer can ‘play’ with a music, by being on beat, becoming one with the music; which is particularly important here. Another element that makes popwave be great in its own way is the creativity.

You have this very strict and limited tool box and so you need to think: “okay, how can I convulse on beat and make it different from the others and be interesting”. Find your own way of popping by looking at the different . Whereas, if we compare it to break, the creativity can come from anywhere, you can make up your own move, have your own way to do the moves, and also assemble preexisting moves into something of your own.

Plus, if we add the fact that most battles are improvised on the music, we can understand how great the dancers are.

And mind you most choreography have chosen their music and most battle are improvised, they don’t know the music that will pass in advance.

 

These two styles are dances as old as hip hop and so we can dance them on basically anything. Plus, technically we enter the debate that any dance can be done on anything. But as a rule of thumb, they are danced on music that are very technical with multiple complexities. Musics that are made for complex musicality, musics that are irregular and difficult to adjusts yourself onto it. Another type of music on which popping is mostly done is slow beats. In those it is easier to change from pose to pose as well as to be able to develop a wave, mostly able for newcomers.

Another name might correspond better here, because, in the appearance of raves in the 1990s popping got heavily mixed with waving to the point where today they’re inseparable. In turn, now we also call this mixture is the “Popwave” for popping and wave or “Liquid” for “Electric Liquid” which was the name rave enthusiast gave, showing how strong its popularization was, because now it’s one of the terms unused to refer to it.

However, popping is clearly a style that is malleable and can be done on almost anything. And I think that’s why it stuck, its capacity to be able to blend anywhere make it still in a lot of favor from a number of dancers today, everyone knows at least a little bit of popping and waving.

 

Anyway, here are some songs that would be perfect musics for popping and waving, and also here are some examples of battles. Mostly what we would call electric liquid for the more dubstep related music but you can also, for some feel the synthesizers from the 80s rather heavily forothers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT9T6DzaNHk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqYuAWhGFqc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIQjbqdlP0U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-gcfQhR_9c

All in all check out the artist tuxedo he does a lot of nice songs that aren’t just beats : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkKZ6hhB4dyHh7wGQ_fKYdw

 

But now let’s look at subgenres or substyles in popping.

Popping has often paired with multiple other styles that we will talks about later, most notably one that rules before him, Locking. Mostly with the ‘pop and lock’ move, move that gave the name to both of these different styles, we can also see it in the ‘skoobydoo’.

 

But in the substyles, we can understand it as a fragmentation of the different elements that compose popping.

Because, yes, I lied to you [outrageous right]. Because popping isn’t just the pop. We could summarize them in 3 main elements that each have their own most dedicated substyles.  

   The ‘hits’ or ‘ticks’ also named pop that make straight popping also known as ticking which you’ve already seen before. but this element is only to describe multiple moves that correspond to multiple substyles, however, we call strutting, the act of solely using pops in one’s dance.

  Strutting is often associated to stretched out limbs with strong ticks, it’s the purest substyle of popping, not touched by any other type of move. And such a restriction requires creativity to not make new move, but to find compelling poses.

But also the ‘isolation’ that literally is part of the control that is to freeze a part of your body in space that is more than heavily used in the substyle of Robotting of Puppetting.

First the robot, is centered on freezing parts and either moving body-parts separate and only move certain other parts.

Then the puppet lets loose every other parts of the body except some very specific joints that stay in the same position. Here the rest of the body works as puppet on string or a scarecrow if you prefer (unfortunately I couldn’t find any gifs of it)

So here is someone that isolates like a robot and puts wave into them (also called boogaloo)

And the last main element is the ‘angle’ with for example the Tetris named after the game, where, what is searched is the originality and creativity in forming various geometrical shapes. It can be a solo choreography, (here done by multiple people but you get what I mean). 

But then there are the ones where a number of people join in to make other shapes was popularized by the French crew “Geometrie Variable” I recommend you their videos. Like this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_ECUtjO1ks

 

Anyway that will be the end to this presentation of popwave (popping and wave... depends on your point of view). One last crumb that I want to give out, is that these two styles are really done on a lot of different music and so you can find that sometimes with things that aren’t AT ALL hiphop.

 

And just for some food for thoughts here are some example of performances if you have some time in your day:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU-J533NMC0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMJ4pWCmWKE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pka1i9c_0Y