The Story Of Popping

What Is:

–

Popping is a street dance and one of the original funk styles that came from California, in the African American community during the 1960s-1970s. It is based on the technique of quickly contracting and relaxing muscles to cause a jerk in the dancer’s body, referred to as a pop or a hit. This is done continuously to the rhythm of a song in combination with various movements and poses.

Popping is also used as an umbrella term to refer to a group of closely related illusionary dance styles and techniques that are often integrated with popping to create a more varied performance, such as the robot, waving and tutting. However, it is distinct from breaking and locking, with which popping is often confused. A popping dancer is commonly referred to as a popper.

As one of the earliest funk and street dance style, popping is closely related to hip hop dancing. It is often performed in battles, where participants try to outperform each other in front of a crowd, giving room for improvisation and freestyle moves that are seldom seen in shows and performances, such as interaction with other dancers and spectators. Popping and related styles such as waving and tutting have also been incorporated into the electronica dance scene to some extent, influencing new styles such as liquid and digits and turfing.

Characteristics:

Popping is centered around the technique of popping (or hitting), which means to quickly contract and relax muscles to create a jerking effect (a pop or hit) in the body. Popping can be concentrated to specific body parts creating variants such as arm pops, leg pops, chest pops and neck pops. They also can vary in explosiveness. Stronger pops normally involve popping both the lower and upper body simultaneously.

Normally, pops (or hits) are performed at regular intervals timed to the beat of the music, but the popper can also choose to pop to other elements of the song, or pop at twice or half the speed of the beat. To transition between poses, most poppers use a technique called dime stopping, common in robot dancing, which basically means to end a movement with an abrupt halt (thus “stopping on a dime”), after which a pop normally occurs. To create variation, poppers often mix in other styles as well, such as waving or tutting, which creates a sharp contrast to the popping itself.

Poses in popping make heavy use of angles, mime style movements and sometimes facial expressions. The lower body has many ways to move around from basic walking and stepping to the more complex and gravity defying styles of floating and electric boogaloo. Movements and techniques used in popping are generally focused on sharp contrasts and extremes, being either robotic and rigid or very loose and flowing.

As opposed to breaking and its floor-oriented moves, popping is almost always performed standing up, except in rare cases when the dancer goes down on the knees or to the floor to perform a special move.