What is the popping dance technique and how do you ‘Pop’?
Popping is a style of street dance, where dancers quickly tense and release muscles (sometimes known as ‘hitting’ or ‘posing hard’). To the rhythm of the music Through adding a contrast in fluid movement, the resulting effect seems almost beyond human, with robotic and animated qualities. To pull this off needs both a high degree of muscular control and a deep knowledge of their music, it’s rhythm and tempo, to ensure timing is exact. The result is highly impressive.
In this article, we’ll explore how popping came about, as well as some popping dance moves, how you can learn these and which music you should ‘pop’ too.
So let’s get started.
Basics Moves and Popping Dance Technique
Hit and Pop
‘Hit and pop’ are the fundamentals of body popping as we can see in this video by Dey Dey. Through controlling the muscles into a tense position, with a burst of energy, then releasing, focusing on the arms and legs. These are recommended as a good point to start but remember most muscles can be controlled and ‘popped’. This can be applied in different ways across muscle groups, such as popping the neck or pectorals.
Body Waves and Arm Wave in Popping
‘Waves’ create a fluid effect like a wave travelling through the body. Typically this is usually delivered as:
· Body waves – where the wave of motion travels through the dancers entire body.
· Arm waves – as the name suggests, concentrates specifically on the arm. It starts at the finger tips and the wave moves up to the elbow, then to the shoulder and in some cases through to the second arm and down to the finger tips.
Take a look at this how to guide from Poppin John. Spoiler alert, as with much in dancing the big takeaway is developing that muscle memory, practice and repetition. The move becomes more and more fluid over time.
Isolations and Dime Stops
An isolation involves moving a single part of the body whilst another is motionless. This focuses on particular movement and muscles. Dimestops are on form of isolation.
Back to Poppin John, who says think of a dimestops as “your dancing being on a video and suddenly the video is paused”. i.e. you stop abruptly.
You can start off simply with an arm, have some tension in it, bringing it in a smooth movement across your mid section for example. Then when the ‘pause’, the dimestop takes effect, you stop precisely, with no shaking or after-movement. It should appear ‘frozen’ even if other parts of your body may be moving. You could then try this in the reverse direction, then the other arm for example. Putting such individual movements together in succession eventually leads to ‘the robot’, which is more advanced, taking time and dedicated practice.
The above movements give a solid foundation to a Popping dance repertoire. With some of these basics down, you can move onto the more advanced techniques.
Advanced Popping Techniques
Dubstep Dance: Rather than a technique in its own right, this is more tailoring the popping dance techniques to a faster dubstep music. This brings increased speed and impact.
In this video, TheRussianTiger gives a great display of this in practice but then takes us through a couple of techniques which work particularly well for dubstep dance:
- Vibrations – literally moving parts of the body in small, rapid vibrations, which can work particularly well when building up to points of crescendo in the music.
- Twitches – Small, slow movements, in a robotic fashion, in time to the music. TheRussianTiger demonstrates this for the head, arms and ‘levels’ where the whole body goes down or up in progressive twitches to the beat, whilst the arms remain stationary as a point of reference, to achieve the desired effect.
Other more advanced popping techniques include:
- Gliding: Building gliding across the dancefloor, essentially slides which can be run in combination with other moves such as isolations.
- Robotics: Essentially the result of a combination of popping and isolations coming together across various body parts. We’ve all seen how impressive the results can be, jerky, rigid, angular movements that are mechanical in their progression. And you can’t get much better than this video of Lia Kim & Tutat – wow, we’ve watched that one a few times!
- Strobing: Through using a series of smaller, abrupt movements, the dancers can achieve a the impression of being in a flickering strobe light and the distortion this has on perception of of movement speed. Essentially a variation of robotics.
- Tutting: Getting it’s name from the Egyptian Art, ‘tutting’ is where particularly the fingers, hands and arms are transitioned through a set of flowing geometric shapes. Checkout this tutting demo.
- Locking: We’re talking about big, energetic, exaggerated moves. This is a progression of advance popping but many consider this a separate dance style.
- Animation: Through robotics but with more changes in speed and direction, the dancer achieves an effect like they are in stop motion.
- Miming: Bringing mime into performances allows more advanced dancers to tell stories with their dance.
Learning to Pop: A Step by Step Guide
Remember, many of the individuals in the demonstration videos we’ve seen have been practicing for years to get to where they are. So next we’ll move on to approaches to learn popping dance techniques.
As popping is so reliant on getting a grasp of individual techniques such as the pops and arm waves and these take time, it may help to set some time at recurring intervals (e.g. weekly) to return to practice these particular moves, building up their impact and beginning to join them as you progress. Personal or online dance classes are also ways to aid learning these moves.
As dancers progress with their popping, often they become part of the community and eventually end up taking part in popping battles. These are competitive but friendly and can be anything from informal meet-ups, to high profile competitions. This is a real test of a dancer and helps to hone performance in front of a crowd.
Now that we know more about the dance moves and techniques, let’s take a look at some of the history behind popping.
History of Popping Dance
Popping started life as a street dance, from California USA, in the latter part of the 1960’s. It was originally associated to funk music and associated to danced mainly by African Americans and Latinos. The Electric Boogaloo’s, a crew of talented street dancers did a lot to shape popping, refining the early approach to the ‘hot and pop’ muscle tensions. The group, consisting of Boogaloo Sam, Robot Dane, Puppet Boozer Scarecrow Scalley, Popin Pete, and Creeping Sidney began to tour more venues and build an audience for popping.
As we entered the 1980’s, there was a shift to electro music. With this evolution, street dance styles such as breakdancing and locking began to to blend with popping routines. Various artists such as Kraftwerk, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Egyptian Lover, and World Class Wrecking Crew played a role in this evolving musical landscape.
Who are Famous Poppers dancers?
Boogie Frantick:
Ricardo “Boogie Frantick” Rodriquez Jr. has been a member of dance crews including MZK, Academy of Villains, Substance Over Hype, The LXD, Celebrity Dance Masters, Funny Bones Crew and The Underground. Highly creative and seamless blends styles such as popping, locking and animation. He’s a highly demanded performer, judge and dance teacher internationally.
Mr. Wiggles:
Mr. Wiggles is another legendary popper. A founding member of the Rock Steady Crew and an early member of the Electric Boogaloos, Mr. Wiggles helped popularize the popping style internationally. His unique approach to the dance involves combining elements of funk, soul, and hip-hop.
Michael Jackson:
Michael Jackson may not be thought of as a popper but he has really left his mark in the world of popping. Signature moves, such as the moonwalk, robot, smooth glides and pops, his dance moves have are now at the core of the popping style. A huge global fan base has drawn attention to popping, as more broadly Michael Jackson went on to inspire many dancers around the globe.
So take inspiration from the greats and happy Popping!
Here’s some other streetdance articles you might be interested in:
Popping: Dance with Precision. 3 beginner techniques.
Clowning Dance: Tommy the Clown & Hip-hop Clowns
Best Street Dancers in the World
