Second Blog: Choice - A Dance Breakdown

So if you can recall, last week I blogged about dance appreciation - or maybe rather giving dance a try by seeing it for more than just people moving their bodies on tempo. I urge people to see dance as more than this by understanding how much thought and consideration goes into dance choreography or the brilliance of improvisation during freestyles or dance battles. In this blog, I want to begin to delve a little bit deeper into a breakdown of New Style Hip-Hop.

For those of you who didn't read my other blog, here's a quick snapshot of it: dance is more than just moving one's body to a song, it takes deeper consideration to really feel the essence of the music and then visually describe it through your movements (whether that means putting on a mean face to create that air of aggression some dancers want during dance battles, or keeping a solemn face to draw attention to the moves' details). In my last blog I posted two videos of two incredible dancers known as Les Twins. Les Twins are two brothers --twins, obviously-- who are known for their vastly unique style, abstract moves, and genre of dance -- new style hip-hop. New style hip-hop is a branch of typical hip hop dancing but it is much more centered around freestyling. This is to say, "Whatever you feel, just dance it out," which means that the style is focused on the dancer literally doing whatever he/she feels. Of course, one must still stay within the boundaries of hip hop dance which is, in a nutshell, stay on beat and connect your moves with one another. This is where new style is radically different: in new style the dancers almost always use beatkill.

Now I should go in detail about beatkill, but let's hold off for now because I forgot to finish with Les Twins. These two guys are incredible. What makes them so incredible is that they are entirely transparent on the dance floor -- they do not stand there and spit out complex moves while on beat, they feel out the music completely and then make a freestyle based off of what they feel. I posted two videos last week. The shorter of the two is an example of a "choreographed freestyle". I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but what I mean by that is the twins heard the song beforehand and then did a freestyle on top of it. Here is that video again. It is three minutes and makes what I am going to talk about a lot clearer. Les Twins beatkill freestyle (Olivia it is worth your time).
The second video I posted was entirely choreographed except for that part in the middle where each twin went solo for a bit. Now what is interesting is that the choreography in this video is still a beatkill as well. Here is that video too for those who missed it, or want to engage in the awesomeness again: Les Twins - epitome of dance

Now, you MUST be wondering, what on earth is a beatkill? Put simply, it is the ability to stay on beat and execute moves exactly accordingly to the beat at that given moment. This creates to illusion that the music conformed to your movement as opposed to reality which is that you are performing the move to match the music. If you saw the videos, it should make some more sense now, why their moves seemed to change so rapidly and "appeared out of place" at times. In either of the videos you must have noticed how certain motions seemed to align PERFECTLY with the music. This is one of the aspects that make Les Twins two of the greatest hip hop dancers: they execute beatkills all over the place and each one is done near perfectly.

A particular reason that new style is different from regular hip hop or other genres of dance is that the beatkills in new style do not need to go accordingly to the same beat. This is where things get interesting...

What that suggests is that there can be an intricate piece of music in the background of the dancers and the dancers can utilize beatkills at any given moment in the song for any given sound in the song. When a beat that loops or has a main, underlying beat but continually adds little topical beats to it along the way can provide excellent grounds to build beatkills in the spur of the moment during a battle or during freestyles. One of the best beatkills I have seen is at 3:33 in the second video link. Check it out, it is too good to miss.

Remember how I said to appreciate the small minute details of dance in my last blog? This makes up a huge percentage of dance appreciation because beatkills are so specific and quick that it takes a sharp eye to notice all of them. Beatkills are making their way into nearly all contemporary dance styles.

In closing here is another video. It's pretty neat because they filmed the freestyle at night on a soccer field...during a game. Yep, you guessed it -- keep an eye out for beatkills in the freestyles! Les Twins Game Time

Kylesh Sharma

Also, let me know if seeing the same dancers is getting repetitive at all. I naturally went to the twins because they are the perfect example of new style hip hop and all its facets.