It’s called House and it’s a feeling

My fav houser right now, Toybox from TM:

Awesome style from Japan, Hiro:

Actually, she’s probably my favorite houser, Tonic from Chi Tribe:

April Rodriguez: Hip Hop vs. Urban Choreography

Link to Article Here you

And here for those of you who don’t want to sign into facebook.

An interesting article, worth reading to anyone interested in the Hip Hop, choreography, the evolution of the culture and all that stuff. It’s a facebook note and I looked at the tag list and it was amazing. Lando, Elm, Mike Song, Gigi, Kyle Hanagami to name a few. Especially, as we grow in Hip Hop, it’s important to examine where we stand and what we’re actually doing as a group.

More of my youtube picks!

Aite, it’s about that time again. I’ve got a whole crop of videos that have been inspiring me recently, so here we go. I’ll try to keep it short, but no guarantees.

Enjoy! Comment on any of yours below!

Bboy Mantiis on Biting

What’s up people.  A while back, Jason put up a really interesting blogpost on a note on facebook on biting.  Earlier this week, I had a discussion with a few people on the concept of biting, and I thought that this blogpost did a pretty good job summing it up.  (My views are probably along the same lines as his)

The writer is Bboy Mantiis, a breaker widely respected in the bboy community.  So it mainly focuses on biting and breaking, but I think it can definitely be applied to other styles of hip-hop dance.  And whether you agree with it or not, it’s a pretty fast read and it definitely merits the attention of any aspiring dancer at any skill level.

Enjoy!

http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=2716029&blogId=347945376
The whole thing is a must read (especially the second part about ‘influence’ vs. ‘biting’

Set building

Hey guys,

So with a lot of the founding members of refresh gone this past year, a lot of people are stepping up to take up creative and administrative responsibilities this upcoming ‘09-’10 season. I’m real proud of where we’ve come these four years, and I’m looking forward to see what you guys can grow into this year.

Since a lot of people will be trying out new artistic roles, whether it be choreography, transitions, or creating a set from all it’s parts. I’ll be happy to give advice to anyone who wants to talk about it, but I’ll also keep being active on the blog. Like now. SoReal (who is from Texas, in case anyone forgot), recently competed in Body Rock, which is one of the biggest competitions in Cali. I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from watching all the different crews competing in Body Rock, from The Camp to Choreocookies, Poreotics to Jabbawockeez. Obviously, this was a big milestone for SoReal, now that they’ve been on ABDC and have gotten their name out there. They had a lot to live up to, and prepared like crazy for it.

They posted a fantastic pair of videos on their youtube, documenting the development of their set from the first artistic thoughts to the last minute performance prep. I’d recommend them to anyone who’s gonna be dancing in a group this year, no matter where.

So without further ado, I present to you, SoReal Cru – The Home Team.

On getting pwnt

Up until now I’ve been taking class in Japan with one guy, who is freakin’ amazing but he follows Americans and Shikkin just like everyone here, so his style has been relatively easy to follow though still technically challenging at times. At least I’ve done well enough that he wants me to perform with him at some point.

So I was reallyyyyy taken by surprise when I got totally OWNED by this girl teacher that I took a class from tonight. I felt heavy, fat, and unprepared entirely O_O. Why? Because she was doing really energetic, old school hip hop from way back when that I’ve honestly never had the opportunity to learn. And trust me it’s harder than it looks – you’d think all that rhythmic kicking and jumping should be easy to catch on… It’s got it’s own technicality to it, but if you can’t keep up with the aerobic component of it, you can forget getting the dance all together! But being in Japan gives me this opportunity to learn a foundation of hiphop I have never gotten the chance to. It really put me out of my comfort zone, and I am truly humbled. Osaka and Kobe are the closest big cities – Kobe is known for old-school stuff and some honestly mega-asian stuff. Osaka, as far as I’ve heard, has more Westernized style? But I don’t really know. I’m going tomorrow to take a few classes to find out for myself.

Anyway guys, don’t forget the importance of practicing your foundation and trying new things! I’m gonna do my best to master this style too.

Love,

Val

yes.

enough said.

Kcheung’s summer inspiration vids

I’ve been watching these over and over. Click the link for high quality download.

Choreo Cookies at Fusion X 2009

The Company at Body Rock 2008

Common Ground at Ultimate Brawl 9 2009

David Moore – “Pocket Aces”

So, for those of you who don’t know who dmoore is, he’s another sick choreographer from LA. He’s worked with tons of great choreographers, artists, and producers, and has some of the craziest videos on all of youtube. He’s been out here to the Chi to teach a few classes, and I was lucky enough to be around last summer when he taught to “You” by Chris Brown.

Anyhow, he put up a sick video about a month ago called “pocket aces”. In it was one of his sickest routines, complete with a setting/backstory and his signature epic introductions to the videos. Unfortunately, it was tagged by youtube as part of their ongoing “audio track not authorized” track. Finally, it’s back, and I think it’s definitely worth watching.

What was posted on youtube:

The full video:

I’d also like to use this as a springboard for some discussion about youtube’s policy. This is going to be somewhat long and drawn-out, and is certainly not relevant to everyone who visits this page. In short, the rest of this post is dedicated to discussing how youtube’s policy of removing audio tracks from all videos that have music that is identified by their software to be copyrighted material. Facebook, vimeo, and viddler all have their own mechanisms of dealing with it, but I am using youtube as the primary focus because it is the medium that I have the most experience with, and certainly has the highest market share, if you will, of online video streaming.

While I can understand the major labels’ motivation for taking action against people who use youtube to post music/music videos that they do not own, I believe that from the perspective of choreographers posting their own work on youtube, the labels have made a major error in taking action for the audio tracks of the video.

Now, wikipedia cites the principle of “fair use” from U.S. copyright law as defined by these four principles:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

I believe that choreographers who use songs to create their work have added substantial value to the song beyond simply using a song as background music for a random video. Oftentimes, a choreographer’s work is tied closely to the song that was used, rendering a piece/combo nearly useless without the audio track.

So let’s examine those four principles of fair use. The purpose of the use of the audio track may indeed be commercial, such as when choreographers submit reels of their work to producers, directors, or indeed even artists in attempt to land jobs. However, I believe that the nature of this usage is tied directly to the dance industry, and is not something unique to youtube or other online video sites. As previously mentioned, a piece of choreography without the accompanying music is essentially useless, but that is exactly what youtube’s specific approach to this dilemma has been. So then what sort of solution could be found to permit choreographers to share the entirety of their work? Are the labels going to charge royalties to the choreographers for using the audio track on youtube? Practical difficulties aside, what then would stop them charging royalties for classes or workshops that play music? I contend that this approach would be detrimental both to the recording industry and the dance community.

In relation to the first and fourth principles, it is very true that choreographers can post their pieces on youtube to promote themselves for commercial work. However, I don’t believe that they are resulting in an unreasonable detriment to the intellectual/artistic value of the audio track. If anything, I myself have a number of times immediately gone to AmazonMP3 to buy a song from a video that just struck me. Even further, I personally find myself preferentially listening to songs that I tie to a specific video/routine, and find myself buying other songs or even complete albums by the same artist, just because a choreographer made a piece that completely blew me away.

I don’t have a solution. I don’t believe that youtube should just throw the doors wide open and remove the disable audio feature entirely. I have seen plenty of youtube videos where there is no video, only the audio track. The video could be at best simply blank, but there are plenty of them that spam with links and pop-in bubbles trying to get you to buy a ringtone, or subscribe to some service. These types of infringement need to be regulated, as they are detrimental to the industry (I doubt many of them pay proper royalties to the labels, and therefore to the artists themselves) as well as to the consumer (I personally find those videos to be irritating, low-quality, and generally useless for what I was trying to accomplish by looking up that song on youtube).

I don’t agree with youtube’s current approach of allowing users to “Audio Sync” the track in exchange for allowing a link to iTunes/AmazonMP3 to appear on the video. The feature is time-consuming, clunky, and indeed not utilized by most users in the situation. It is far easier to upload the video to another site or alter the audio and reupload to youtube, rather than struggle through trying to set up the audio through Audio Sync. Since choreography is so rhythmically dependent, it is even more important that the audio track be perfectly synced to the video track.

What I would suggest generally as good steps would be for youtube to have some kind of approval process, where artists of any kind who would like to use copyrighted audio for work such as a choreography piece will have the iTunes/AmazonMP3 popup in the bottom of their screen. Personally, I would find that immensely useful as a direct link to getting the song, instead of needing to delve through the sidebar info or the comments to try and find a track title, and then searching Amazon or iTunes manually to find the song. I understand that this is a naive perspective that would be rather impractical to implement, but perhaps this idea may provide a jumping off point for a truly practical solution to be found.

Again, I don’t have a solution. I realize there is a lot that I haven’t covered here, and I consider this post to be a sort of work-in-progress. I will be soliciting feedback so that I can expand and improve upon this, hopefully to the point where this can be of some use to the community. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have comments regarding this. This will be regularly updated on my google docs, and I’ll try to keep it up-to-date on this site as well.

Relevant info:

• Google Docs: https://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dc9gdxms_0fgkgs8dq
• WordPress Blog:
• My youtube username: subtlerhythm
• WordPress username: ch1apet

[DISCLAIMER] I have no experience in copyright law. I have minimal experience in the dance industry, being more of an avid fan and a passionate hobbyist than an actual member of the industry. I wrote this because I feel like through this issue, everyone from the consumer to the artist to the labels is suffering. Please feel free to distribute this to whomever you like, but keep these last few bits so that any feedback can make its way back to me.

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