Skip to main content

Stormdance.tv is a channel for dance tutorials made by, Niels "Storm" Robitzky. The videos on this channel provide great insight into the philosophical, technical, and performative universe of Storm. His 40 years of experience in dance education and professional stage work lay the foundation for the clips on this channel. Understanding the main principles of a dance style is the most important ingredient for a successful learning path and becoming part of its community. Storm elucidates the very necessary background information of concepts and styles. The clips are aimed to guide students into a state of independence. That means Storm`s instructions are tools that should help dancers to become self-inspiring and self-sufficient. His experience should help you to save some vital research time and to keep his students away from fatal errors that may lead to miscommunication in performance. Nevertheless, he stresses that dance is a craft and craftwork is slow. It is based on merit, so it will always depend on a persons work ethic to become good at it. Just watching the videos and understanding their content is not enough to develop consistency in execution. It takes hard work. Well, if you are a true dancer that notion of strong physical involvement should not put you down, but rather challenge you in a positive way. Lesson one: We all grow by dealing with resistance Welcome to Stormdance.tv The dance Styles that I teach and that are represented in the videos are mostly known as Breaking Locking Popping All of them have names for subcategories and also umbrella terms that can be confusing for beginners. Breaking is also known as B-Boying and B-girling. Few people still use the derogatory term Breakdance. The style has many subcategories that can be easily divided into Toprock (dancing in a standing-up position) and Downrock (dancing in all positions besides standing up on feet). Locking is also known as Campbellocking, due to the originator of the Style whose name was Don Campbell. Besides being one of the most known Soul-Train-Dances it is also part of what people call Funk-Styles. Popping is a dance style that comes from the origins of the Electric Boogaloos from Fresno California. The main ingredient of the style is a particularly intense way of flexing one's muscles to the beat of the music, which creates for example the illusion of an electric shock. Today the term Popping is often falsely used for every dance style that creates illusions, like Robot, Waving, Tutting, and Snaking. Therefore I use the term Illusionary dance forms in my video for a better understanding and for its political correctness. Other than for Locking and Breaking, this term does not describe a style but the unifying idea of all existing dance styles that create optical illusions. ...And now I hope you'll dive in and have fun watching. Storm

Live stream preview

Watch this video and more on stormdancetv

Watch this video and more on stormdancetv

Subscribe Learn more

Already subscribed? Sign in

Stormdance _on judging_holistic vs reductionist

Philosophy & History • 6m 7s

The difference between the two judging methods:
Holistic Judging
&
Reductionist Judging
is mostly unknown to the general audience.

Holistic judging is
descriptive and supports individual development.
Judges look at the entire spectrum of qualities

Reductionist judging is
prescriptive and supports the development of chosen categories.
Judges look at selected areas.

The different approaches produce different consequences.

Up Next in Philosophy & History

16:09

Stormdance_Rudiments

Stormdance_Rudiments

Rudiments are the most simple versions of moves with all of its basic facts included.
By working with rudiments we study the coordination of the movements. It is the conditioning of the forms with their rhythms.
At the same time we learn how to learn a language. In any language, written, spoken...
29:44

Stormdance_IDF_Three thoughts on Free...

Stormdance_IDF_Three thoughts on Free...

When improvising we tend to get lost in thoughts. While the music plays at a steady pace we as performers must be able to stay coherent with it and build our rhetorical narrative.
-Time changes
-Stops
-Repeats
have a great effect in keeping our cognition on point and getting our message across. ...
26:12

Stormdance_Breaking_history

Stormdance_Breaking_history

Breaking is a dance form that was developed in the Bronx / NY in the 1970s first by Afro-American and then by Hispanic youth. It blew up in the 1980s and became known all over the world. In this video, Storm tells you how he experienced it growing up in 80s and 90s.