House in the Halfstep!

So for the past 3 years, my whole dance style has been bboying. For the past year or 2, I have eaten, slept, dreamed of bboying. My style has progressed a lot. I'm not considered sick or anything. I have some style, I can rock the beat, got some footwork and a lil power. But what do I have to distinguish myself....aside from being 1 legged I guess haha. I've decided I need to learn other dance styles. Joining culture shock last year was a good start. Learning how to do choreography is probably going to be one of my biggest challenges as a dancer, but in the end hard work always pays off no?

Long story short, I've decided that I'm going to learn how to house dance. I'm extremely blessed to have some people from the DC scene offer to show me a thang or two. House(the person) is an incredible dancer, and he offered to show me his trade. Its only been a week, and I still feel like a complete whitey on the floor, but I'm starting to understand more about the music and the dance. House(the music) is all about freeing yourself, letting the music take over, its more smooth than breaking, and its very difficult for me to grasp. Well I was dancing the other night and a black guy walked up to me and said you must have some n***** in your blood the way you dance. I was caught kind of off guard haha. But I thought it was a really funny statement. I'll have to let my dad know that perhaps he's not my dad lol.

I think this weekend I've probably clocked about 20 hours dancing haha, my legs are dead, I think my real foot is about to come off. But the pain will make my legs faster, and make me a better dancer. Tonight I went to another house(music) party. I've never joined a house circle because I really have no idea what I'm doing, but someone pushed me into it tonight, and I just went with it. It felt kind of awkward at first, but then something happened, I got caught in the moment and then everyone started cheering and clapping. At that moment I completely lost it, I just let the music take over. I ended up pulling out some bboy stuff (standing on my head) and I was kicking my legs in a house beat somehow hitting the beat. Everyone went wild! It was really cool. I think its just beginners luck.

I think that taught me a really big lesson about house dancing, and probably house in general. When you are nervous, and really worried what people are thinking, it stops you. It takes up part of you, your mind starts working too hard, and your body can't express the music properly. Once you let go of everything, and just feel the music, and let your body do what it wants with no concern of who's watching or who thinks you're whack, it moves correctly. Its good to learn different dance styles and different dance patterns/steps, but the most important for you is to truely feel the dance. It is then and only then when you'll come up with some truly unique stuff that is yours alone.

A lot of this reminds me of something Kate told me once. Each time you learn a new style, it makes all of your other styles better by proxy. I'm a bboy. I'll always be a bboy, thats my chosen style. But the more I learn about house, popping, locking, salsa, whatever style, I can take the lessons I've learned from those and apply it to my bboying. That is where a bboy gets his truly unique flavor, when he can progress bboying style and bboy art. So I guess I'll be learning for a damn long time, because there are lots of styles out there to learn. And I'm betting the more styles I learn, the better dancer I'll become and the more quickly I can pick up new styles. And I hope there are as nice of people out there in each of these new styles as I have met through my experiences with bboying, housing, and hiphop/choreo. We
re all artists, and we've got to keep our art alive by sharing it with others.

Peace
Halfstep