Archive for the ‘pop culture’ Category

How media sharing is changing the value proposition of street dance

Since its inception, street dance has benefited from it’s organic connection to hip hop music and urban culture. Arising in the 1970’s out of disco, funk, and the black and latino urban cultures in America’s inner cities, hip hop culture encompasses all the art forms including music, visual art, dance, and poetry, as well as fashion and design. As hip hop has spread from the underground to the mainstream culture, it has gained a foothold in large entertainment and media industries as well. The Sugar Hill Gang and Run DMC became some of the first Billboard topping hip hop music groups, sparking megastars like Michael Jackson and Blondie to embrace and emulate this new vibrant street culture in their music and videos. Along with hip hop’s rise in popularity, street dance forms such as break dancing (or bboying) became well known and dance crews arose on every street corner and club where hip hop music spread.

Still to this day, street dance styles develop in tandem with new strains of hip hop, electronic and club music. The two disciplines of dance and music virtually exist to support each other. Club music is made to get people dancing, and the dance styles form around the different rhythms and vibes of the music. Since the decline of hip hop music sales, simultaneous with the rise of video’s popularity online, the power dynamic of the two art forms are shifting. Previously the hip hop music industry was the giant, and hip hop dance played a supporting role in music videos and stage shows. Now however, hip hop dance seems to be moving ahead through its popularity with viral video hits. Today dance videos are becoming important ways for music tracks to get noticed, rather than the other way around.

Marquese Scott, aka Nonstop, is a streetdancer from Inglewood, CA. He started dancing in high school after jumping in a dance circle at a local skating rink and getting “maxed” (laughed at and humiliated in front of his friends), which spurred him on to practice and win other dance battles. Today he is part of the Atlanta-based dance crew RemoteControl and his specialty is “animation”, a robotic style of motion that comes out of poplocking and autobot dance styles.

After a special appearance on So You Think You Can Dance with Remote Control, Nonstop began posting solo videos on YouTube that garnered a great deal of attention. His biggest hit was a solo performed to Butch Clancy’s dubstep remix of “Pumped Up Kicks” by Foster the People. Seen over 24 million times, Nonstop’s simple video was done in a single take from a camera he left on a tripod. What follows is a mindblowing display of movement that seems to defy gravity, time, and any other human constraints. The video was immediately picked up by bloggers and major media outlets who fueled its viral fire. While Foster the People’s single was already a break away hit, Nonstop’s video elevated the dubstep remix version to chart topping levels as well.

Since his YouTube success, Nonstop has become a sought after dancer for commercials, music videos, and live appearances. His story reveals an alternate path to a career in dance that is becoming more common in the era of online video. As streetdancers continue to post viral video hits online, videodance is poised to become a major pop culture phenomenon, akin to music video on MTV thirty years ago. Dance and music will still be inexorably intertwined, but this time, the dancers will get credit and esteem as well.

Encompassing a multitude of urban dance forms from breaking to crumping, and from popping to jerking, street dance is a thriving movement with both a strong amateur community and a robust industry of professional artists. Since the launch of social media and web video technology, street dance has had an artistic renaissance. No longer relegated to local street corners and individual club scenes, street dancers have fully exploited new media outlets to share their moves with a global community eager to see and learn more.

In this three part series we will discuss:

1. The artistic effects of media sharing on the development of street dance forms.
2. How media sharing is changing the value proposition of street dance.
3. What the concert dance world can learn from street dance in the video age.

Pt 1: The artistic effects of media sharing on the development of street dance forms

In October 2009 a crew of young Oakland street dancers uploaded a video on YouTube that showed four of them meeting on a street corner in the rain. The music was solemn and reverential, and their moves were graceful and emotional. Unlike most street dances, these dancers weren’t battling it out, instead they were paying tribute to a brother who had died on that street corner, and expressing their grief the way they knew best, by dancing. Unbeknownst to them, this video would put these artists on the international map and set the course of their careers.

The crew is TURF FEINZ, and they were filmed by their long time friends and collaborators, the Oakland-based video production company, YAK FILMS. Within a few weeks the video had gone viral in Europe, spreading from Germany to France, then to Brazil, Russia, and Denmark. Ten months later, the video took off stateside and today it stands at 3 million hits and counting. YAK FILMS have gone on to produce a weekly video series cataloging the street dance from around the world, and TURF FEINZ now has their own internationally recognized dance style called Turfing. Among other things, YAK FILMS puts out a very popular series of street dance tutorials taught by rising talents. Here is one on how to do the wave taught by Chonkie from TURF FEINZ.

In street dance, the goal is to be seen as the biggest, baddest dancer out there. One of the ways to do that is to coin a new move or a unique style that everyone tries to copy. Street dance choreography is generally made in a competitive environment, with dancers literally battling each other. The more their moves are copied, the better bragging rights the originator has. As moves get copied, each imitator tries to put their own stamp on the choreography, resulting in many mutations and variations on the original. With the advent of YouTube and online video sharing, this evolutionary process has gone into overdrive. Now a single video can be seen by millions of viewers worldwide in a matter of days or hours. When a street dance video goes viral, the choreography will be copied by hundreds if not thousands of other dancers and tweaked each time. These imitators will post their own videos online, and if even a couple of these go viral again, it starts a new wave of mutations. In this way, street dance forms are evolving at a breakneck speed. If an evolutionary biologist were to study street dance, they would be astounded at the rate of new moves, genres, and styles being made all the time. The developments in this form are growing at an exponential pace. As a result more has happened in street dance in the past five years than in the 30 years prior.

Chris Anderson, the curator of TED conferences, mentioned the phenomenal growth of street dance in his TEDtalk “How web video powers global innovation.” Anderson presented his theory of “Crowd Accelerated Innovation” to explain the rapid evolution occurring in many cultural and scientific sectors today. The way street dance spreads is a perfect illustration of the three components that make up “Crowd Accelerated Innovation.” First you need a CROWD of people that share a common interest, then LIGHT or clarity need to be shed on the crowd so that they can all see each other, and lastly you need the DESIRE to excel. Street dance was already a global movement when YouTube appeared, but the light that web video was able to shed on dancers everywhere from rural villages to inner city street corners enabled dancers to reach for greater recognition and influence on a scale never possible before. Anderson says that “Crowd Accelerated Innovation” is a kind of positive feedback loop where the more light that gets shed on the street dance movement, the more people desire to become dance stars in their own right and join the ranks of the crowd.

Jon M. Chu, filmmaker and creator of the popular web series, The LXD (The Legion of eXtraordinary Dancers) spoke of the new renaissance happening in street dance in his TED talk by saying, “Dance has never had a better friend than technology…Dancers have created a whole global laboratory online. Kids in Japan are taking moves from a YouTube video created in Detroit, building on it within days and releasing a new video, while teenagers in California are taking the Japanese video and remixing it to create a whole new dance style.” Chu speaks from experience as the director of the blockbuster hit movie, Step Up 2: The Streets and his latest success with The LXD, that was cast entirely through YouTube audition videos. Chu believes that what is happening right now in the “underground” street dance community will resurrect the popularity of dance to its status during the Golden Age of movie musicals. Once again kids will grow up with dance heros like past generations had with Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly and Michael Jackson.

What is immediately apparent when watching TURF FEINZ’s video is that the dancers are well versed in many dance techniques including ballet, jazz, and modern, as well as street dance forms like breaking and locking. In an interview for the Bay Citizen, YAK FILMS director, Yoram Savion said that YouTube has been important in the development of TURF’s signature style. “The dancers would come to my office and watch YouTube videos,” Savion said. “They’d watch everything. Once we even saw a random video of 1950s jazz dancing in Chicago that the dancers would incorporate into TURF.”

As street dance continues to garner devoted fans on YouTube, and new moves spread like wildfire across the internet, big media industries are taking note of it’s rising popularity. Street dance professionals are finding plenty of demand for their work, and an entire indie dance/film industry is rising up around the culture. YAK FILMS is an example of how one production company got its start by specializing in urban street dance. In the next segment of this series, we’ll examine how the video age is effecting the commercial potential for street dance giving it an economic edge over other many other dance forms.

Contemporary dance lovers and dance film aficionados have been set afire by the latest music video by pop sensation Beyoncé Knowles. “Countdown” is a breezy number about all the ways to “keep your man,” however beyond the driving beat and batting eyelashes the video displays many blatant quotes from works by choreographer Anne Theresa de Keersmaeker, including her seminal dance film “Rosas danst Rosas” and “Achterland.”

To see the quotes clearly, some fans of de Keersmaeker put together this video showing Beyoncé’s video and the original material by de Keersmaeker side by side. Incredibly, it is the second video that comes up when you search for “Countdown beyoncé” in YouTube!

In a statement for the social network, Dance-tech.net, de Keersmaeker responded to the hubbub by saying that she is neither flattered nor upset by the heavy borrowing from Beyoncé, rather she is sad that it has taken so long for the world to recognize her dance experimentations from 30 years ago.

Personally, I think it is great that Beyoncé and her creative team have brought these dance works into mainstream consciousness. I’m also happy that the arts community has responded with a flurry of comments on YouTube because it is leading Beyoncé’s fans to see de Keersmaeker’s work for themselves.

This is not the first time Beyoncé has quoted great choreography. Her viral video hit “Single Ladies” was clearly inspired by Bob Fosse’s choreography for “Mexican Breakfast” (Beyoncé found as a video mash-up with the rap song “Walk it Out” and has since been removed from YouTube). What was wonderful about “Single Ladies” was all the subsequent copying that happened around the world with millions of fans reconstructing the choreography and posting it online. From fat men to 3 year old kids, everyone and their brother learned that piece of choreography to perfection. Can one wish for anything more as a choreographer? It was a stroke of marketing genius for Beyoncé to give that choreography away for millions to copy and share. I can only hope that “Countdown” does the same.

What do you think? Are you outraged or overjoyed? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Update 10-26-11: Here’s a news clip from Reuters announcing de Keersmaeker’s pending law suit against Beyoncé. Doesn’t look like she’s taking the imitation as flattery!

Kinect Installation at Singapore Dance Fest

When Microsoft unleashed the Kinect last fall as an add-on for Xbox 360, hackers and geeks the world over were chomping at the bit to break in and figure out what it can do. That’s because the Kinect is a $150 piece of equipment that contains a super sophisticated camera that can detect depth (3D), color, speed and motion, as well as stereophonic microphones that can place sounds in space. As a result it’s basically a rudimentary brain that has both sight and sound senses and can capture and respond to the world like a sentient being (almost).

The list of Kinect hacks has been piling up since it was released last November, and it will keep growing thanks to Microsoft’s new Kinect Developers kit for Windows (apparently a Mac kit is in the works). Among the coolest developments is motion capture software like Jasper Brekelman’s Brekel that enables anyone to create their own mo-cap animations using the Kinect. Here is a preview of “Under the HUD” by Triangle Productions, an animated series using Brekel and Kinect’s motion capture capabilities. Although the choreography is not so impressive, they give great insight into how they are using the technology.

The sensors on the Kinect make it a powerful tool for intermedia performance. Amazing live interactive animations like those of Chunky Move’s “Mortal Engine” can be obtained using the Kinect for a tiny fraction of the cost and technological know how. Here is an example of an artful performance with live video projections using a Kinect developed by the media and design firm 1024 Architecture.

There have been many technological precedents to the Kinect, but for a much higher price tag. In the dance world this kind of technology was formerly only available to universities and world class dance companies with loads of funding. The prototype of Kinect’s camera and microphone alone cost $30,000! How can Microsoft charge only $150 for the same technology? Well the answer is in the popularity of the device, which has already sold 10 million units and counting.

The fact that this device is called Kinect and was designed to track the motion of the human body seems to be a dream come true for dance artists and movers. I can’t wait to see what artists and geeks will come up with next.

To learn more and see loads of videos about hacks for the Kinect go to: Kinecthacks.net

After so much hype, I finally got to see the first season of The LXD – Jon M. Chu’s dance-based Action web series.

I’ve been intrigued by this project since I saw Chu’s call for dancers on YouTube a year and a half ago. He’s really got a vision of making dance action films that resonate in today’s era of social media. The back-story behind the project is almost more interesting than the plot line itself. A film director gets assigned to make a sequel to a Hollywood dance movie – Step Up 2: The Streets. While making this movie he falls in love with dance, specifically the skill involved in hip hop and street dance. This becomes the genesis for The LXD – an X-Men like legion of dance superheroes. To execute his new project, he took a completely modern approach. Instead of creating a feature length movie, he planned it out as a series of 10 min “webisodes” that would premiere online and later be consolidated into one “movie” for distribution on Netflix and DVD. Chu found his cast of dancers by putting out open calls on YouTube for dance audition videos. Then he built up a ton of hype for the series by creating hugely popular Twitter and Facebook pages, and added to that with a bunch of live appearances at big media events such as the Oscars, So You Think You Can Dance, and the TED conference.

From a marketing standpoint alone, I am very impressed by Jon M. Chu and the attention he has garnered for his project. Now what about the dance filmmaking itself?

I don’t think it is productive to rate The LXD based on originality. If you’ve seen as many dance films as I have, nothing in this series is groundbreaking in its approach to film and dance. What I was hoping for was a harmonious balance between dance, framing, plot line, and rhythm and he surpassed my expectations on most of these counts. The dancers are truly extraordinary, the camera movement and framing adds to the dynamism of the choreography, and the music and the editing came together in surprisingly artful ways. The weakest element by far is the plot line and the acting. Telling a story through dance is very difficult if you want it to seem “naturalistic” and believable as Chu’s Hollywood film background seems to lead. The problem is that dance is a poetic art form – using gesture, metaphor and symbolism to tell a story. When you try to add words, or worse yet, ask dancers to deliver lines, you run into dangerous territory. At best this Hollywood narrative approach makes The LXD series seem a bit clunky and cheesy, and at worse it detracts from the enjoyment of truly great dancing.

Thanks to the mini-series format of The LXD, Chu was able to play around with his approaches and switched it up a bit. In ten chapters you can see as many ways to tell a story through dance film: from silent film to split frames, and from web video to action film. My favorite episode was Chapter 3: Robot Lovestory with Madd Chadd, a pop-locking wizard whose robotic moves truly seem to defy humanness. Chu styled this episode after early silent films with dramatic music, jump cuts and short texts that appear as dialogue. The zany jump cuts across time and spaces keep the viewer sniffing for the narrative trail. Rather than hitting us over the head with the story we become detectives feeling our way around just like the main character who wakes up suddenly in the hospital with no memory of what happened to him.

Another notable episode for dance filmmakers is Chapter 9: Fanboyz which is basically a well-made instructional video on how to make great dance films. A vlogger, Cole Waters cracks the code to the initiation process to the LXD and posts his findings for all would-be members. He says if you want get picked up by The LXD (ie get your dance films noticed!) then you must:
1. Master a style of dance
2. Post it online (remember to use the space and your surroundings!)
3. Show a unique style
4. Be patient

That about says it all!

Season 2 is now playing on Hulu and this time we get to know the villains! Should be juicy. I’m staying tuned…