This week’s In-Depth meeting with Kailey and Gyu min was very successful. We began the meeting with Kailey leading us through a quick 5-minute warm-up which included cardio, repetitive dance moves, stretches, and other movements to a quick music beat. Once we were all warmed up, we reviewed the basic dance moves we had learned in our last two sessions. We practiced the kick-step-back, the step-together, and the newest move we learned, the step-together-arm movement. We worked on that move a little longer, perfecting the arm movements and chest pops which we were having trouble with. She constantly reminded us to extend our arms to the fullest and to focus on every part of our body, so no movement was limp or half-way. She also told us to connect our movements so that on each beat we hit, the rest of our body naturally moves the way we want it to. I learned that hip-hop is a lot about hitting the beats in the music, and the movements often come naturally if you let yourself feel the beat. Something that went really well during our session was that there was a lot of improvement in our dancing after only two practices, and we could easily take Kailey’s advice and apply it to ourselves. The three of us communicate very well with each other, and we ask a lot of questions to clear up any confusion. Dance and movement can be hard to explain, and not being able to exactly describe a technique is a big obstacle in learning dance. However, Kailey does a very good job using analogies and examples to help us improve, and we always clarify with her when we are confused. After practicing, we were running out of time, so Kailey told us for homework that we had to collect a few songs we would be interested in dancing to and come up with a few dance moves of our own to add to our final dance. Originally, I had planned to learn an already existing dance. However, Kailey seems confident that we are able to choreograph our own dance with the skills we have already learned from her so far. I am skeptical on how that will turn out, and I’ve expressed my concerns to her, but we’ve come to a compromise that we will try making our own dance to a song of our choice, borrowing moves from already existing dances and of course with the assistance of our mentor. Next week we are bringing our songs and moves to the table and will be beginning to discuss and assemble a rough version of our final dance.
Video of our third meeting: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NybQboxfC4eVntO8-QKqur22UQVtyBzW/view?usp=sharing