Wazzup Pilipinas!
Your friendly neighborhood pambansang blogger was invited to attend the elimination rounds for the R16 Philippines event. At first when I saw the poster, I thought the words "popping", "locking" and "all-style" were simply adjectives used to define the dance battles, but when the elimination rounds started I immediately realized it meant three styles of dance techniques.
Many registered to try their luck in winning the elimination rounds and getting the opportunity to battle at the ultimate dance battle events happening at a bigger venue for many spectators to witness, and a chance to represent the Philippines at a competition to be held outside the country competing against other representatives coming from different countries.
Trusted Wikipedia explains that "popping" is a street dance and one of the original funk styles 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.
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| Organizers of Throwdown Road to R16 starts the elimination |
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| Our host for the day gives all necessary info to the participants |
"Locking" basically means freezing from a fast movement and "locking" in a certain position, holding that position for a short while and then continuing in the same speed as before. It relies on fast and distinct arm and hand movements combined with more relaxed hips and legs. The movements are generally large and exaggerated, and often very rhythmic and tightly synced with the music. Locking is quite performance oriented, often interacting with the audience by smiling or giving them a high five, and some moves are quite comical in nature.
A dancer who performs locking is called a locker. Lockers commonly use a distinctive dress style, such as colorful clothing with stripes and suspenders. This was the reason I noticed that a lot of them were wearing striped shirts and some even had peculiar outfits like a Spiderman mask, and even an all yellow-colored costume.
I am assuming "all-style" would mean any style they wish to use. But unfortunately, the winner of this competition has no opportunity to take his talent outside the country. But it was a lot interesting because, if I am not mistaken, a few of the competing participants were composed of girls, unlike the first two where the contestants were purely boys.
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| The DJ has a lot of popping locking all-style beats in her library of great music |
Many of them also competed for all three dance styles so the participants would sometimes change their outfits to make it more fitting for the dance style they were competing in.
More photos can be seen soon at the Wazzup Pilipinas Facebook Fan Page: https://www.facebook.com/wazzuppilipinas
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| Locking Dance Battle |
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| Popping Dance Battle |
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| The sign of a winner. Either left or right hand pointing to the winning participant. |
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| The sign of a tie. Participants need to battle again. |
The Throwdown: Road to R16 Popping Locking All-Style (1 vs 1 Battles) where held at the Blue Light Studios located at Kamuning Road in Quezon City.
The elimination took a lot of hours to complete. I was there as early as 12 noon because I was invited for a R16 Philippines presscon at the same venue. Unfortunately, the presscon did not push through so I had to wait until 3 pm for the Throwdown: Road to R16 event, and stayed until almost 7 pm. I was not able to stay until the end to find out who won as the final three. There were actually a lot of times when the battle was a tie so they would have to repeat the 1 vs 1 battle to determine who is deserving to move on to the top.
I will update this with the winners as soon as the organizers send it to me.
As of this writing, the R16 Philippines event was already held last March 29, 2014 at Mall of Asia so I'll be posting another blog article to mention the winners and highlights of that big competition.
Ross is known as the Pambansang Blogger ng Pilipinas - An Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Professional by profession and a Social Media Evangelist by heart.
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