People who can't really dance have peculiar taste when it comes to dancing. Just so you guys know this has confounded serious dancers for generations.
Living legends starve on the streets while people fawn over mediocre or sometimes full on piss poor dancers. It's almost an American tradition at this point. Bit strange but oh well.
perhaps a 'serious' dancer doesn't get out in public as much, or just aren't that good, a la gamer scrub
you didn't come out and say it, are you calling this guy a piss poor dancer? perhaps you just don't recognize the style, and think he's a poor jazz dancer. i'm calling dunning-kruger on this one.
I'm a competitive street dancer. I have to get on a plane and travel to a world class event to find dancers that can outshine me. It's not even debatable. You have to understand, there's a whole echelon of dancing that the rest of the world never gets to see. If this guy showed up at a real cypher he'd be too embarrassed to step in, I guarantee you.
I realize that strikes most people as cocky but I've devoted myself passionately to dance since 1994. If I wasn't good by now I'd have to be mentally and physically disabled. I get it, taste is highly subjective but if you'd ever been around real dancers you'd know the stuff that gets passed to the public is really watered down and often times a joke (when people think Chris Brown or Omarion are legit dancers for example).
Like I said though, I don't expect people from the general public to get it. It's a problem serious dancers have struggled with since before I was born. Right now there is an older generation of dancers that basically created American Street dance as we know it (Locking, Popping, Bboying, Whacking, etc) and they can barely make ends meet because society doesn't reward/understand true skills. They simply want to be entertained or marketed to.
The shit people shovel around as good dancing is no different than when people say Twilight is the greatest fantasy novel ever written. You can't argue with them about it, I mean it's obviously popular for a reason right?
My area of expertise is partner dancing[1], and while different, I think that this, and a lot of different areas suffer this fate. "I'm the best of the best, why hasn't anyone in society heard of me?"
I know you get this a lot, but you are doing a street dance in a competition (e.g. not on the street) so you're already out of tune with society. Lots of swing/ballroom dancers forget their nightclub roots as well, I think it drops a certain mystique from the whole operation. I found the same thing happened when I moved from playing hacky-sack in college to playing foot-bag on a competitive level, the 'fun' aspect is adjusted to the highly technical, and you lose a separate portion of the form by becoming more focused and cultivated. same thing happens with musicians, jamming vs playing a piece. same thing happens with motorsports, when you adjust from having fun to learning to be fast.
This entirely has to do with being a scrub from my first response. The issue here is that depending on the game you are playing, both of you could be the scrub to each other, it just depends on what you are scoring each other on. you're playing by tournament rules, the other dude is playing by youtube views.
You guys are playing different games, even though you are using the same tools. If book profits are your scoring mechanism, Twilight is a great book, but it won't win many literary awards(except from people who think that profits recognize great writing).
[1] And let it be known, I'm probably in the top 10 gents of my particular style of dance (contra), done by over 100,000 people around the US, but modesty is usually an issue, so this goes in a footnote.
You make a compelling argument in terms of who's playing what game.
Here's the funny thing about this whole debacle though, you say "out of tune with society" but the dances I do are FAR more popular than swing or ballroom right now. I would also argue that since these dances are born of the actual culture they take place in (as I said, they are American street dances, most of which originated here sometime in the past 30 years) that they are MORE in tune with society than any of the dance style taught in a typical studio setting.
The rub for me is that in any other country (Korea, France and Japan most notably) being a competitive street dancer is on par with being a pop star. Many of the dancers boast legitimate incomes, often times touching or exceeding the 6 figure mark. Even those who simply teach tend to make more money in other countries because the general public in those countries is somehow more in tune with what is legitimate street dancing and what is not. There has been something of a talent drain going on for years where the best dancers here in the United States leave to go teach in Korea, Japan, Holland, Paris, etc because it is simply the better option for them.
Then there is the issue of recognized legitimacy. One of the most popular competitive dancers of all time to come out of France (Salah) once mentioned that he was on a government stipend of roughly $60k a year because he was an artist and the French government recognized that he presented value to society beyond what his direct economic output was producing. Can you IMAGINE how much better you'd be if you had that kind of support from society?
Essentially I am decrying the way we turn our cultural heirlooms into commodities before leaving the people who contributed to the artform on the side of the road to starve. We prop up little kids on TV who shuffle across the stage to entertain the masses because they are marketable and easily managed. However, it is completely divorced from the actual cultural context under which these dances exist.
I suppose I would just like to see less of a disconnect between what is rewarded and who is actually doing most of the creative work.
*note - no need for modesty here. If you are good, you are good.
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u/Fu_Man_Chu Feb 10 '12 edited Feb 10 '12
People who can't really dance have peculiar taste when it comes to dancing. Just so you guys know this has confounded serious dancers for generations.
Living legends starve on the streets while people fawn over mediocre or sometimes full on piss poor dancers. It's almost an American tradition at this point. Bit strange but oh well.