Recently, for various reasons, Spiderman and Love have been some of the main themes organising my thoughts (and those at the studio as well). At first you would be forgiven for arguing that these two seem completely disconnected especially since, given my schizophrenic lifestyle, I am sometimes wont to going off on tangents, BUT if you dig a little deeper the two can be clearly linked by using THE Spiderman quote “with great power comes great responsibility.......’
Still confused? Allow me to elaborate:
Love, in my opinion, is one of the most powerful emotions and with it comes the responsibility to promote, share, support and protect the thing that you love.
For us at Dance Station, that thing is dance as a whole, more specifically the ‘dance scene’ and most specifically (no surprises here) waacking.
It’s important to all of us that the heritage (i.e. the foundations of the individual styles and the fact that all these forms weren’t born in the studio, they were born in the club) of waacking, and other forms of ‘street dance’, is conserved but not preserved.
The difference being that preservation is what’s done when we want to keep something in its exact original state, like the Egyptians were trying to do when they created mummies, whilst conservation is what’s done when we want to maintain the essence of something but allow it to change in a natural way.
In other far less flowery words, us lovers of waacking, (and lovers of other street dance styles), never want it to lose its foundations but also don’t want it to stagnate and stay the same but to grow, develop and EVOLVE.
One way of doing this is to bring new people in; people with a love and appreciation of all these styles whether watching or performing people, with fresh insight and fresh ideas yet a shared understanding of where a style has been and where it’s going.
But the question is how to do this?
In a way that is probably very indicative of the differences in the way our minds think, I spent an inordinate amount of time devising an algebraic formula that describes how and @MlleGinger created the one and only event: WAACK DATE - an event that simultaneously conserves the heritage of street styles by bringing the social element back and supports their growth by allowing dancers of different styles to interact with each other in a completely unique way:
By pairing one waacker with a ‘date’ of a different style and pitting the couples against each other in a fight to the finish, waack date allows waacking to reach a far wider audience than it has in the past and allows dancers, through observation and training and the creation of KICK-ASS combos, to expand their vocabulary and, consequently, take their styles up a gear.
It really is a battle event like NO OTHER, one that feels fundamentally different in its energy and atmosphere, and the fourth date was on a whole different planet to waack date the 3rd with Anna Ninja and Sofiabulous appearing as guest battlers.
Whilst there is still the hunger for the win on the floor, there is also an electric atmosphere where it is clear that all the people (and believe me there were A LOT of people with the doors closing just under an hour after opening!) in the building are absolutely LIVING their lives either performing or spectating. It being obvious that by not just bringing back, but celebrating, the social aspect of all these styles @MlleGinger’s event puts the fun and the sheer HYPE back into the battle ground.
The energy that this creates makes all the spectators, even those who might not normally come to underground battle events, feel welcome and part of something HUGE and makes those on the floor feed off each other in such a way that it liberates and makes it feel, not only ok, but really great to try something new - a feeling that yours truly definitely enjoyed and proved to be a MAJORLY successful formula for Dance Station’s own @KleioBows who, along with her fellow musical-theatre-technical-breh partner Dharms absolutely killed it and went on to win the whole thing (snap, snap, snap)!! Throwing themselves all over the place in ways that I have never seen before and clearly having the absolute time of their lives - even when facing the fiercely formidable Anna and Sofia (who had taken out all the competition so far by being OFF THE CHARTS SICK) in the final
You can see how all of this WENT DOWN in the videos on @MlleGingers YouTube account (see below - and pay particular attention to my highlights: 1. Kleio and Dharms vs. Shyno and Bagsy - especially Kleio's round kicks - 2. Anna Ninja and Sofiabulous' first round of the night in their battle against Miss Eleanor and Kieran, 3. The 'split' combo by Kleio and Dharms and Kleio's knee drop in final) and, by listening to the crowd, you can get a sense of how hype it was in there.
What you can’t get is even one tenth of what it feels like to be there, to be part of it, to scream and shout until you’re hoarse and to jump up and (if you are as diplodocus-ified as I am) fling your hands about until you knock beer all over the people sitting next to you (much to their annoyance) because there is simply no other way of expressing how psyched you are feeling when you see some of the stuff hitting the floor, and to come away feeling (especially if you are getting a lift home with the WINNER) as if you are high on life.
To put it mildly, you walk out feeling like Eliza Doolittle i.e. as though you could have danced all night and still have begged for more. No. To get any of this you will just have to come to the fifth one - it’s going to be MASSIVE do not miss out!!!!
What you can’t get is even one tenth of what it feels like to be there, to be part of it, to scream and shout until you’re hoarse and to jump up and (if you are as diplodocus-ified as I am) fling your hands about until you knock beer all over the people sitting next to you (much to their annoyance) because there is simply no other way of expressing how psyched you are feeling when you see some of the stuff hitting the floor, and to come away feeling (especially if you are getting a lift home with the WINNER) as if you are high on life.
To put it mildly, you walk out feeling like Eliza Doolittle i.e. as though you could have danced all night and still have begged for more. No. To get any of this you will just have to come to the fifth one - it’s going to be MASSIVE do not miss out!!!!
Long live waacking, long live battling, long live @MlleGinger, @NickyShort, DJHooch, @The_TDA (the team) and LONG LIVE WAACK DATE!
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