Saturday, December 7, 2013

Shivers crawling under my skin. Seeing this dance makes me NUTS!

Have you ever had a dance partner so good that you just felt bound together ?

Well this is what all this video is about. One of the best dance moves I have seen till now and it's not just from 1 guy/girl, it's made up by a couple in Brazil.

You should watch it fully and let us some comments:

Useful Article:

Dancing is one of those inescapable facts of life. It comes up over and over again in social situations. You might was well learn to do it. It's not as hard to pick up the basics as you may think, it's smoother sailing once you know how to do it, and it tends to score you points in lots of situations.

You don't have to reach a particularly high standard

You just need to be good enough that you can get on the dance floor, blend in with everyone else, not look like an idiot, and not feel too uncomfortable while you're there (lots of people are at least somewhat awkward about dancing, that's why they have to down a few drinks and wait for the dance floor to get busy before they step out on it). You don't have to look like someone out of a music video, you've just got to be decent enough to get by. Being better than the minimum never hurts of course, but just knowing the basics will put you way ahead of all the non-dancers out there.

Don't worry too much about what the opposite sex thinks, they don't have ultra-picky standards

People don't purely dance to impress the opposite sex, but it is often something they think and worry about.

For guys

Generalization time. Women and men have different ideas of what a good dancer is. Guys often see dancing as a skill to show off. Being 'better' than other dudes on the dance floor is important to them. Their typical image of a "good dancer" is a gymnastic break dancer doing a bunch of flips, or a guy doing a fancy, fluid Popping & Locking routine. A woman's concept of a good dancer is a closer to a passably moving guy who looks comfortable, confident, and like he's having fun.

When a woman wants to dance with you, all she really wants is that...

You are there with her

You are dancing with her

You are not dancing horribly

For women

This totally sounds like a simplistic stereotype, but most of the time when you're dancing with a guy he's not making a detailed critique of your style. He's probably just thinking, "Yay! I'm dancing with a girl!" Or if he's watching you dance from further away, he's likely thinking, "She's seems like someone I might want to talk to. I wonder if she'd shoot me down though." Even if he seems like the most genuinely suave, confident guy ever, he's probably still thinking like that on some level. He's probably fifty times more worried about how his own dancing looks to you. Even he is an amazing dancer and you're not, he probably isn't holding it against you.

Don't worry too much about what other people think

Easier said than done, but don't use up too much mental energy fretting about how random bystanders are judging you. Sometimes people will snicker and point to people who are dancing because they're really just too nervous to do it themselves. Random dudes sucking on their beer aren't your audience. Also, like the point above mentioned, your average dancer is more preoccupied with how they look than anything.

If there's one thing to keep in mind it's to be toned-down and low key

Don't be a spaz and try to pull off some crazy moves unless you 100% know you'll look good doing them. It's better to reel yourself in. Over reaching and being 'that guy' is worse than blending in and being a bit boring and unoriginal. Don't feel you have to pull off tons of new moves every second and put on a show for everyone either. It's okay to dance in a simple, repetitive way and just enjoy your friends' company.

Acquire a basic, reliable dancing 'core'

You know when you're watching a movie or TV show and there's a scene set in a dance club, how the extras in the background will often to be dancing in a kind of simple, nondescript way? That's the 'core' I'm talking about. If you know how to do that, then in a lot of situations that's actually all you need. However, if you want, you can later choose to build off of that and make your style more fancy.

To get that core stand in front of a mirror with some not-too-fast music on, or just read along and imagine you're doing the following:

To dance you've got to move your body in time to the beat of the music. The most basic newbie mistake you can make is to move out of sync with the beat. Don't know the beat I'm referring to? Put on a song and listen for the underlying, repeating thump-thump-thump pattern. Every style of music has a different speed. It doesn't take much practice to learn how to hear it. Okay, you're just standing there in front of the mirror with some song playing. Now try moving your arms back and forth to the beat slightly, while keeping your legs ramrod straight. You'll notice that looks totally off. So the next most basic thing you've got to do is bounce up and down on your knees. So keep everything else still, and just move your knees up and down to the music. That still looks weird, since you're just going up and down like a piston. So rotate your torso a bit in time with your knee movements, a little like you're skiing. Keep your torso fairly loose and relaxed.

That's looking better, but your arms are still stiffly hanging at your side. So try relaxing them a bit and let them swing up and down with your knee bends and torso rotations. Once you're standing in one spot, bouncing on your knees, turning your torso a bit, and moving your arms somewhat, that's about the absolute bare minimum you can do to be considered dancing. Like I said, sometimes that's all you need. If you didn't know how to dance at all, and stopped right here, that's a lot better than nothing.

However, while still staying in the realm of dancing in a super generic 'core' way, you can do little things to spice up the bare minimum:

Don't just limply swing your arms, get your shoulders into it. Take steps side to side, or back and forth. Mix up your arm movements. Nod your head. Do little pivots or twists on one foot, or both feet. Don't just slightly rotate your torso, move it back and forth, or from one side to the other. Pick up one foot ever so slightly, then the other, to kind of march in place. Don't overdo the movement and look like a robot, just move your feet a tad. Mix up the possible arm, torso, and leg variations. Find a combination that looks good and do it for a while, then switch to another one. Don't mix things up to the point where you're doing something new every half a second. That looks too scattered. At this point you're hardly going to win a dance competition, but you're at the level of those movie extras, and 75% of the people you'll see out at a bar. At this point you really could develop no further in your dancing ability and be able to get by on a dance floor for the rest of your life.

The thing with this basic core is that it's pretty adaptable to the standard kinds of music you'll come across. If you're dancing to Hip Hop, just make all your movements a little more Hip Hop-ish. If you're dancing to retro 80's Pop, just make all your moves a little more cheesy and energetic.

Add some more fancy moves and sequences onto your core if you want to

If you dance in a basic way you'll get by, but you won't stand out a ton. If you want to look a little slicker you can start adding in some canned movements, or sequences of moves. There's more of a Risk/Reward thing going on at this stage. You've got to work at it more as well. Dancing generically is safer and easier. If you try to pull off some awesome routine and bungle the execution you'll look clueless or goofy. You need to practice to make sure you look good. Some places to learn new moves are:

By watching strangers dancing at a club and stealing ideas from them.

By watching your friends dance.

By watching movies or music videos.

Through online video tutorials.

Through dancing-oriented video games.

By experimenting and trying to come up with some moves of your own.

By taking an actual class.

The best way to learn is to just practice

If you get into the habit of dancing around at home in the spare moments you're listening to music it won't be long before you start to get the hang of things. After that the more time you put in, the more you'll refine your style.

Get in front of a mirror, put some good music on, and start dancing to it in the basic way I mentioned above. Remember, if your instinct is to jump around a lot or be a bit spazzy, consciously tone yourself down. Try to get comfortable with the typical, boring way of dancing first. A lot of the time on actual dance floors you won't even have that much room anyways, so if you only practice moves that requires a lot of space you'll be put in an awkward spot when you end up somewhere more crowded.

One way to deliberately practice is to try working on one aspect of dancing at a time, then putting the pieces together. This may not look good in the moment, but it'll let you concentrate on and isolate certain aspects of how you move. So you might keep everything else fairly still, and only try out different arm movements, or ways of moving your torso. Or you could try different ways of stepping back and forth, or moving only one leg at a time.

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