Last Sunday me and Phil ventured down to Wakefield for Attention to Detail to attend Flo’s workshop.

Here are my key points I took away from what was covered:

• Style – use all your body parts in creative ways to add original flavour to your moves. The feet do most of the moves, but your heads, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes add the style
• Create new top rock moves and interpret the same moves on the floor to come up with new footwork.
• Musicality – listening to the track and picking up on the recurring accents such as cymbal crashes every 8 or 16 beats etc. Make sure you go down to the floor at the start or end of a bar (on the accent beat and not randomly part way through a count of 8 beats) and hit your freezes on beat.
• To contrast with freezes and fast footwork try to add slow elongated moves when there are long droney notes and accents in the music – this adds another dimension to your throwdown instead of everything being aggressive and as fast as possible. Mixing up the tempo and dynamics adds style and makes your set more interesting.
• Power moves – for whipping and kicking power train sweeps, both directions with both legs. Then practice entering the power move from sweeps. Sweep to flares, sweep to mills, swipes etc.

Practising power moves brought us to the end of the workshop…

I had previously done one of Flo’s workshops covering the same areas a year or two ago, but it was great to be reminded of the key aspects that a lot of people are unaware of when they’re breaking.

It’s all about the music, it is a dance after all!

I just wanted to write down these key points to review what I learned before I forgot again, but maybe you will have gained some useful knowledge from it too… and if Flo holds another workshop you’ll know to check it out because it’s all amazing stuff, going much deeper than just how to do this move or that move, instead covering the stuff that really matters for those who already have a bit of experience breaking.

Laters potatoes!

And why not a quote from Flo for this post:

“Her life long ambition is to go see Stevie Wonder?!?

What kind of an ambition is that??

My life long ambition is for Stevie Wonder…to come see me!”

Florent Gonthier

Ahh, nothing like a bit of Wild Cherry, anyway that has very little to do with this post…

Seeing as B-Boy Sprained-Ankle hasn’t been training very much recently I thought I’d share a video of me playing a funky groove on my conga drums instead:

If you’re interested in learning the basic techniques of how to play a hand drum, or make rhythms using other easily available percussion, check out our website for free instructions Bass – Tone – Slap – Drumming Techniques

In recent news

Our crew has a couple of shows booked in for this month. You can see us rocking the stage at Oceana on Monday 15th February for the Chinese New Year party! As well as a show to start off a martial arts competition… inside a cage haha! Unfortunately I’m gonna miss that as I’m in Edinburger playing drums for the entire weekend.

Since spraining my ankle landing a front somersault like a spazz, on top of the physio to strengthen my ankles back up, I’ve been doing a bit of training and breaking that doesn’t require the use of my left leg. Which is even harder than it sounds! I always use my left leg to push off to do pretty much everything, so I had to switch it up and try getting into handstands the opposite way round, even forwards rolls felt weird! But this is a great lesson for all b-boys and b-girls to really build their co-ordination, make new neural pathways in the brain and increasse your versatility…

Try doing moves you already do the other way round.

A lot of us already know this is a good idea and probably practise it to a small extent, but we get lazy and stick to ways we are used to. Take a ttep outside of that lazy thinking box and try this:

If you do a lot of your footwork like six step clockwise, learn it anti-clockwise. Master your freezes on both arms – baby freezes, 1 handed handstands, elbow freezes, shoulder freezes, chairs, air chairs etc. Then when you’re getting the hang of that and feel like an absolutely ridiculous challenge to work on – try learning your power moves in the opposite direction! Miss having awful bruises on your shoulders and hips… then why not learn windmills again the other way round! Enjoy the pain all over again, hahaha.

“Failure will never overtake me if my determination to succeed is strong enough.”

Og Mandino

This is an absolutely amazing/hilarious video from Brett Domino giving a demo of the cool new Stylophone Beatbox: Portable Beats Machine. I’d seen the product in the IWOOT catalogue a while ago but never realised the incredible potential until my Father told me to check out this video featuring some classic b-boy tunes and other hip hop beats. Prepare to be astounded, hahaha:

Brett Domino: Hip-Hop Medley – Stylophone Beatbox

Click here to buy your Portable Beats Machine on sale for less than £10!

It’s got a build in loop sampler! I WANT ONE! IWantOneOfThose.com are charging £20 – no thanks…

I think I’ll be placing my order very shortly with findmeagift.com – click here to get your Stylophone Beatbox on sale for under £10!

“100% of the shots you don’t take don’t go in.”

Wayne Gretzky

So here it is a day late, or 364 days early…

Happy Birthday B-Boy Philthee

Last night town was absolutely dead, hardly anybody anywhere – it was freezing and there’s an abundance of snow everywhere! However, WE ARE THE PARTY, so we had an absolutely awesome night jamming where ever we went… some were even breaking on the street… in the slush and snow! Dedication or what!

Phil was of course killing it, busting out flares to the max and everyone else was repping hard. I even popped out a couple of front flips and everyone went mental, cause they’d never seen me do it before ha ha Phil started throwing down on the road while the traffic lights were on red, then the Police turned up and told us they’d seen us obstructing traffic on CCTV… Bruce’s response – “Yeah it was sick wasn’t it?! He was killing it!” hahaha.

Monday was also Aahid’s, Afro’s and Shane’s Birthday and if I’m right in thinking Jingle’s Birthday on Tuesday too? I might as well just say Happy Birthday to all the b-boys who’s Birthday it was recently, you’re all lovely and I hope you enjoyed yourselves!

Now I’ve got to go do some real work, so here’s your ‘quote’ for today…

Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday dear Philthee
Happy Birthday to you!

Me

Here’s a magical Christmas gift for you all to enjoy in fullscreen High Definition:

It seems a lot of clarity has been lost in compressing the video and adding a soundtrack. So, please watch it fullscreen in HD so you can see what’s going on

A quick note to express my happiness that Rage are Christmas No.1 in the UK – AWESOME! I’d love to hear Killing in the name on next years annoying Christmas album that’s played everywhere all through December!

Just to let you know I also finished a crazy bad ass design for a t-shirt recently, check it out:

Dreadlocks ICameToDance.com Face white tee by icametodance
Shirts from Zazzle

Have a fantastic Christmas and New Year, why not Valentines, Easter, Birthday, Diwali, Hanukkah and anything else while I’m at it!

“Now you do what they told ya! Now you’re under control!”

Rage Against The Machine – Killing in the name

1. I’m lazy.
2. I started training some top secret moves which I didn’t want to share with you until I had perfected them.
3. In the process of practising these new top secret super bad ass moves I pulled a muscle.

So I have only been b-boying a tiny amount when I have been itching to move my feet on nights out, no hardcore 2 or 3 hour training sessions at the gym recently I’m still resting and hopefully recovering so I haven’t had any cool new video updates for you.

However, you will be pleased to know while I’ve been injured I’ve been training my fingers instead and working on some fun close up magic! So if you’re lucky my next update in the very near future will have a bit of that thrown in for your entertainment.

I have also been watching the Move Like Michael Jackson dance contest on BBC Three, which has just finished! A dance contest judged by Jermaine Jackson in search for the best MJ inspired dance act to perform at his Michael Jackson tribute concert to be held next year. Initially I thought the competition was going to suck and be full of idiots grabbing their crotch attempting to moonwalk. What I really liked was all the Jacko imitators were shot down as soon as they auditioned because of the fact they specifically were not Michael Jackson carbon copies. Instead they were searching to find dancers who clearly admired Michael as a performer, took his moves, made them their own and elevated it to a whole different level.

I started watching the progamme just because I knew B-Boy Didge (Daniel Ovel) was in it, but then realised there were other soloists and dance crews who were actually really good with all sorts of different styles and flavours competing too! Unfortunately Didge only made it to the Semi-Finals… but then again… HE MADE IT ALL THE WAY TO THE SEMI-FINALS! Very well done to him … not sure about that sparkly school uniform costume though…

If you missed the Move Like Michael Jackson programmes you can catch up on the BBC iPlayer here.

The editing did my head in when trying to watch the performances though. It looks as though they filmed everything from all angles, and then chose to show all the worst possible shots so you had no idea what was going on. Only on watching it again do you realise you missed a sliding headstand which was one of the most impressive moves of the routine or something. Well done to the BBC editors on that one.

Be quick if you want want to watch the show, the videos might be gone in less than a week from iPlayer!

As a breaker I found it incredibly inspirational to watch the entire series going from the Auditions to the Finals. Soaking up all the different dance ideas, approaches and thought processes behind each act was amazing. There were a few awesome routine ideas to take away and build on that I hadn’t seen done anywhere before. As a b-boy sometimes you become oblivious to the entire world of dance that is also evolving outside your bubble. Sitting watching new battle footage of Hong 10, Morris, Junior etc. on YouTube you tend to distort your perception a little and only appreciate things like backflip to airchair or 10 planche press ups perhaps forgetting how impressive simple yet well executed moves can be.

‘Free your mind and your ass will follow!’

So after you’ve caught up with the Move Like Michael Jackson contest, here’s an amazing video to inspire and spark some creativity within you:

I think Zee posted the video on facebook a while ago. It whoops ass all over the Endangered Species crew’s backflip routine. So smooth and fluid – I had to share it with you! And that transitions nicely on to the quote I shall leave you with today…

“Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend.”

Bruce Lee

Anyway, here are the details to win a pair of SportStyle Asics and breakdance mat. Quite a cool competition challenge I think, I might have to enter myself… I could do with some new kicks to train in!

Find Your Flavour and win a pair of ASICS SportStyle trainers and breakdance mat

Win a pair of trainers from ASICS SportStyle and one of the first ever breakdancing mats – start the year the freshest kicks by sending us your freshest pics!

To celebrate the launch of their SportStyle range, ASICS have created the first ever breakdancing mat. Put together with the help of award winning B-Boy Mouse, it is designed to teach novices the basic moves through simple, guided steps. One lucky entrant will be able to win one of these mats and pull off the toprock, sixstep and even the wakfreeze. The winner will also receive a pair of ASICS SportStyle trainers to practise new moves in true style.

How to win

Winning is simple – find your flavour and photograph it!

Started breaking in front of a local attraction? Dressed your dog in a tracksuit? Maybe you spotted something quirky, like funny graffiti or discovered a really funky record in your parent’s music collection.

If it’s got flavour, it has a chance of winning

Simply take your photo, ‘fan’ TooMuchFlavour on Facebook, then post your photo to the wall for a chance to win.

For further details, example photos and to watch a video of what happened when the ASICS SportStyle breakdancing mat took to the streets of London, go to http://toomuchflavour.co.uk/competition_entry.html

Ok, that’s all from Dave, back to me - they’re claiming its the first ever breakdancing mat. Not sure what they mean by that, cardboard and lino were used way back in the late 70′s… but I  remember being shown a hilarious video of Alfonso Ribeiro, the dude who played Carlton in The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, releasing a similar product way back in the day (1985)!

That’s enough comedy for today. Remember to get taking your flavoursome photos to post to the TooMuchFlavour facebook fan page!

“And tell mum and dad it’s the safe way to break and pop. Not the things you shouldn’t try.”

Alfonso Ribeiro

Obviously this was the first session practising it, so it might take a while to smooth out, but here’s an inside scoop for you peoples!

I thought I would mix up the tunage a bit and surprise you with the 5th Symphony! Check me out killing those beats! Ha ha.

I’m going to the gym now so I’ll practise rolling about on the floor a bit more and then it’s the tumbling class later. Hopefully I’ll perfect my standing front somersault so I can bust it out when I’m breaking!

Until next time hombres…

There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.

Warren Buffet

Keep it real!

Masta Ace – Fresh Jive 28th November 2009

9pm onwards tonight at The Elbow Room in Leeds there will be a 7 to smoke bboy battle and later on Masta Ace performing all the hits at  Fresh Jive!

The first Fresh Jive event in a while, which is nice I know Shane Fenton (B-Boy 10Tonn) and the Fresh Jive/Speak to the Streets crew have had a busy year, so keep up the good work guys! I’m sure there are some awesome events in the pipeline for next year!

The Haggis Horns – Local funk band are also playing tonight at The Wardrobe with their new singer Lucinda Slim. If time will allow it, I might try go to Fresh Jive and then over to The Wardrobe to catch the gig for an ultimate night of pure hip hop and funk!

The Masterz Crew Showcase Battle

12 Midnight at Shed Bar Thursday 3rd December

After an absolutely awesome night out b-boying at Tiger Tiger on Tuesday, my mate Luke, a manager at Shed Bar in Leeds thought a breakdance performance would be the perfect fun and different entertainment for the Shed Bar’s 1st Birthday on Thursday 3rd December. So The Masterz Crew have been booked to get our groove on the only way we know how – B-BOY STYLE!

We’ll be warming up from about 11pm ready for the show to start around midnight – a 3 on 3 exhibition battle lasting between 10 and 15 minutes! I’m not sure of the 3 on 3 crews yet, but obviously the side I’m on will smoke them foooools on the other side! It’ll be like The Battle of Briggate all over again!

After the showcase battle we’ll stick around to jam for the rest of the night. You’re all welcome to come along to watch and party with us later … even the uncool people who were planning on staying at home watching YouTube bboying videos, you can come too!

Thursday the third of December two thousand and nine – Put it on your calendar, if there were a hook it would be totally off it!

Attention to Detail – The Hop

Wakefield 13th December

The next ATD is set to be full of festivities! With a Christmas themed fancy dress competition for the b-boys and b-girls it is definitely going to look interesting!

As well as the usual battle format which is always awesome, this time there will be special exhibition battles and showcase performances… and Fusion has asked me and Ross to do a 3 round exhibition battle with a bit of a twist. I’m not entirely sure if that’s for definite yet, but either way I’ll probably be there having fun so come down!

Just Jam International B-Boy Event Video

14th and 15th November – Newcastle, Dance City

Earlier this month I told you about Just Jam International and how much it sucked that I wouldn’t be able to make it, boohoo :’( so here is a sweet compilation from Sole Heaven of some of the b-boys who battled on the day. If I watch it fullscreen, turn the sound up and squint I can pretend I was right there in the audience…

Click here for more footage of the full bboy battles from Just Jam International.

Sole Heaven have written up a rather lovely review complete with photos too, have a gander here.

That’s the end of that chapter. Hopefully I shall see you at one, if not all, of the awesome b-boying events in the next few weeks, but for now here’s some fantastic advise for life:

” Do your kids a favor – don’t have any. ”

Robert Orben

Peace out!

WTF COLLECTIVE – Jon Lajoie

For those of you who haven’t seen any of Jon Lajoie’s other hilarious comedy or music videos before, enlighten yourself here! His Everyday Normal Guy, Everyday Normal Guy 2 and Everyday Normal Crew rap videos are amazing!

Healthy sports supplements for the aspiring b-boy!

“Yeah you’re whack, ’cause everybody understands what you say
But when I get on the mic I make milk out of clay.”

Jon Lajoie