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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
Locking
Locking is a dance style that was created by Don Campbell in the late 1960s in Los Angeles.
In my videos I stress on the percussive parts that make Locking funky and break it down as means of expression. Hence, performing is all about communicating. Whether your audience gets what you are doing or not always depends on its competence. Following my series of videos will give a lot of analytical insights that may change people's perspectives on how to look at dance.
