#bboylifeapplication

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My strategy is totally just to not defeat myself and to have fun and be free.

-Daniel Cloud Campos at Red Bull BC One 2009

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“Obey the principles without being bound by them.”

-Bruce Lee

I always find the application of Bruce's philosophy of style to be breaking to be somewhat meta, seeing how it is about applying different styles/ideas together to create a whole new one. Bruce Lee reminds us that it is important to fully understand the fundamentals of a style (be it for dancing or martial arts) but not restricting yourself to just one of them. Breaking is already an amalgam of different dances put together so always keep a keen eye on all forms of movement and see how it can apply to your own style of dancing.

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That Moment of Flow

When dancers talk about "flow", it usually regards how smoothly their transitions are from one movement to another. You can tell how good someone's flow is by how easily they are able to transition movements together to complement each other in the process. On rare occasions, a b-boy can achieve the apex of their flow where their transitions blend so perfectly together that they mesh together in perfect harmony along with the energy surrounding them. This can be compared to when an athlete is "in the zone". Coincidentally enough, psychology identifies the mental state of a moment of perfect flow (or "flowment" as I'd like to call it) as just that, "flow".  According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (a man with a name I can only remember how to pronounce by saying and gesturing "Me, Highly Cheeks and me, highly") flow is a state of a person is in when they are 100% focused and engaged in an activity that they find highly stimulating. In hopes of making this a little easier to understand, I have "borrowed" this graph from our gracious friend, the internet:

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Battle Mentality: Meeting Expectation(s)

If you ask any b-boy about their first experiences of battling, chances are they are going to mention the following things: increased heart rate, sweaty palms, trembling limbs, and the overwhelming realization that all eyes were on them. It is no surprise that  musicians, actors, and athletes experience these same symptoms when dealing with Performance Anxiety, also commonly known as "stage fright".

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An interesting read. Since I always had an itch using "b-boying", since it excludes women, I think I'm going to start saying "breaking".

I want to touch on a topic that most of us find meaningless but should be talked about and hopefully fixed. For the last decade when describing 'Breakin' the...

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My Exhibition at Tradition III - Part 1

It was a warm sunny day when I decided to join some friends of mine for a birthday bar crawl. As our fine fermented beverages dug their hoppy fingers into our livers, our brains lead us down the conversing path of reminiscing over our halcyon days in breaking. But as every rose has its thorns, this also brought up our not so fine moments as well. Like any close friend, my crew mate couldn't help but mention "that one exhibition" I did. The exhibition he was referring to was back in 2010 where I battled Serg of Jungle Brothers in Houston, Texas. Now I could provide a list of variables that may defend my poor performance that day but I live by a strict code of learning from my downfalls rather than hiding behind a wall of excuses. However, I will provide a fun picture of the look I gave to the DJ after he changed the song DURING one of my rounds for the 2nd time.

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All Aboard the Tommy Express

Being systematic in nature, I tend to forget one of the most vital reasons why I love dancing so much. Thankfully, there are people like Tommy Franklin out there to help remind us of a little thing called “Joy”. Why am I being so mushy in a blog about a dance style that can be so competitive, intense, and even dramatic at times? I think it's best for Tommy's performance to answer that question for us:

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The unseen force of movement manipulation finally brought to light.

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Mental Filtration

It goes without saying that the atmosphere of a battle is much more intense than a practice. In a practice, mistakes can easily be shaken off without any consequences and you aren't the focus of attention for a venue full of people. There have been countless thoughts that have suddenly popped in my head and psyche me out during my round. Just like a scale, one slight shift of change threw me off balance (both physically and mentally), causing a hindrance in my performance. Some of the most common things I would suddenly be concerned about would be the energy of the crowd, the venue, constantly reminding myself "Don't mess up!", who my opponent might be, or who the judges were. Sometimes even off the wall thoughts that weren't really related to the battle itself have thrown me off (I once psyched myself when I noticed someone that used to constantly berate my dancing was sitting right behind me during my round).

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Pande(mime)monium

  When I read the title of this video, I didn't expect to see the performances to be so theatrical. It's not the actual lip syncing they attempt that I find to be so entertaining to watch but  how they focused more on pantomiming or personifying the essence of these songs. This reminds me the rare times I would a good part of a song I knew by heart and knew exactly how to dance along with it. When the lyrics said "down", I went down. When the lyrics said "poison", I acted like I drank poison and fell over. When the lyrics said "time", I.....acted like a clock. Some of the most impressive feats of musicality I've experienced were from b-boys that were able to not only be in sync with the beat of a song, but the tempo and all around feeling of it. There are a lot of notable b-boys that are famous for their musicality but there is one particular one that I was reminded of when watching this lip sync battle:

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Sharing not Comparing

For the past few days, I've seen a lot of people posting about this video, commenting on how awesome and "dope" it is. So after seeing it refresh on my newsfeed for the umpteenth time, I finally decided to watch it. Although this 1on1 all-styles battles was impressive, I wasn't very drawn to continue watching. I was only able to resist the temptation to close out the video due to my curiosity in finding out what the hullabaloo was all about. Then I reached 6:20. It's very rare to see dancers on opposing sides not only start a collaboration like this, but to also be harmonized to the point of making it almost seem rehearsed.

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A Method I Could Count On

When preparing for a battle, I went the extra mile by finding out who the DJ was and trying to find as many as his mixtapes as I could. I would also look for battles in YouTube that he was spinning for, not to watch the b-boys but to listen to the type of music he would play for different parts of the battle (Preliminaries, Top 16, Top 8, etc.). Although there were times that I patted myself on the back whenever I got a song I knew from one of the mixtapes I heard, I found the whole preparation process taxing and the advantage I gained from getting a song I knew during my round didn't equal out all of the mental energy I put into studying it along with the other songs I would end up not dancing to. There were too many variables for it that made my method of studying inefficient, the biggest one being that the mixtapes I studied may have been outdated and the DJ may have a plethora of new songs I have never heard of.

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Strange Movement

Recently, I heard a podcast that talked about a very interesting topic of speech and song.

http://www.radiolab.org/story/91513-behaves-so-strangely/

Although I encourage any curious mind to listen to the whole podcast, the part I'm only going to touch on is between 0:00 - 4:10. Diana Deutsch explained that while hearing the same phrase in a loop, her brain eventually started to interpret it not as a speech but as a song. As I listened to this podcast, it made me wonder something a little similar. If there is some sort of blurred line between speech and song, is there also one for movement and dancing? Again, I really encourage everyone listen to the whole podcast. I especially found the part about tone languages, such as Mandarin, and how it influences an individuals musical ability to be quite interesting.

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How I Felt About Shake the Dust

As I mentioned in my previous post, I said I would write about my experience with the documentary Shake the Dust.

You can read about it here.

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A friend of mine recently wrote this blog and I found his choices and explanations to be quite interesting.

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Upcoming Topic: The Mental State of Flow

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