A BTM PRACTICE GUIDE
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THE REASON I WROTE THIS
I remember the day like it was yesterday.
I was teaching at a dance school in Manchester. The subject was one of my favourites, how to identify your organic and technical side.
Halfway through, one of the dancers stopped. He looked at me and said, “I like this exercise, Nickel, and I understand it. But I don’t know who I am as a dancer anymore. I feel completely lost after gathering so much information these past three years.”
Then it was his turn to dance. Thirty seconds in, he stopped. “I can’t, Nickel.”
I told him to finish. He did. And he did it correctly, every part of it.
Then he said the thing I still think about.
He wasn’t a beginner. Three years of classes. He could execute anything I asked him for.
He just couldn’t say anything with it.
WHY THIS HAPPENS
In any style, it’s important to learn the foundations and respect them. Hip hop is no different. So that’s what you did. You learned them properly.
You learned them so properly that now, in the middle of your round, part of you is checking. Am I doing the bounce right? Is that rock clean? Does this look like hip hop?
And that checking is exactly what produces a recitation.
Dance is a language, and I haven’t found a better way to explain it.
Movement is the tool we use to express ourselves, much like words in a conversation.
If movements are the words, then the foundations are the grammar. Bounce, rock, roll. They’re the structure that lets the words make sense together.
Words
Your movements
The steps you know. Everybody collects these.
Grammar
The foundations
Bounce, rock, roll. What lets the moves make sense together.
Voice
Your groove
Your natural way of moving. What makes you recognisable. This is the layer almost nobody trains.
Tone
Energy variation
What makes the same sentence land differently.
THE PART NOBODY EXPLAINS
Here’s how it usually goes.
The moment you decide you want to learn hip hop, you take some classes, and you look online. And online you’ll find a lot of videos like 30 hip hop basic steps, or 50 hip hop basic steps. Good videos, made by people who know what they’re doing.
So you watch them. You practise. You try to learn as many as you can.
Then the music comes on, and nothing happens. You don’t feel it. And you’re left wondering how you can have practised all those movements and still not be able to dance with them.
Here’s why.
The common order
The order that works
Learn the grammar
Drill the foundations until they are correct.
Find the voice
Work out how you already move, before anything else.
Wait for a voice
Assume it arrives once the technique is good enough.
Bring the grammar into it
Put the foundations inside how you already move.
Keep collecting moves
Add more vocabulary when it still does not feel like dancing.
Go deeper, not wider
One subject for three months instead of thirty new steps.
You end up a dancer wearing a style
You end up a dancer
If you put those movements into your dance without understanding how to integrate them into your natural way of moving, you end up copying the movement. Copying isn’t the same as dancing, and no amount of extra steps turns one into the other.
WHAT THIS IS
Four exercises, in order.
[1]
One song
Takes one song. By the end of it you’ll know which way your body actually wants to move, and most dancers get a surprise.
[2]
One song, filmed
A simple way to see the patterns you keep repeating without noticing. Once you can see them, you stop trying to delete them and start building with them.
[3]
Thirty seconds
There’s one small change to how most dancers do it that opens up options you didn’t have before, and makes you less tired at the same time. You’ll feel that one in about thirty seconds.
[4]
One song
The exercise that shows you whether your vocabulary was ever really the problem. It’s the one I’d keep if you only kept one.
Running through all of it are nine questions you write into, straight into the file or printed out. By the end you’re holding a written profile of yourself as a dancer, in your own words.
The guide also carries my full hip hop foundations training, the video where I teach the bounce properly, from the mechanic up. It sits inside exercise three, so it reaches you at the moment you actually need it rather than as something extra to get through.
Get the practice guide, £27
WHO IT’S FOR
Your natural way of moving was there before your first class, in how you walk and what your body does when a song you love comes on.
This finds it early, so you build on it instead of burying it under three years of other people’s moves.
For seven years people knew me for my flow. Then the feedback started arriving: it’s great, but the technique needs to get sharper.
So I went all in on shapes, lines, symmetry, tutting. Hours of it. After two years my dance felt broken. I hadn’t added anything, I’d replaced myself with a worse version of somebody else.
WHO’S WRITING THIS
I was born in Haiti and moved to Paris at thirteen. I took my first hip hop class over twenty years ago and I didn’t like practising the foundations. I wanted to play with the music and dance and have fun, not do the same step over and over again.
It took me a long time, and one expensive detour, to understand what they were actually for.
I’m the founder of Beyond The Moves. I teach around the world, so I’m lucky enough to talk with a lot of dancers in a lot of different places. And there’s a misunderstanding about the hip hop foundations that keeps coming up.
Some dancers swear by them. They’ll look for the foundations in every single move you make, and if they can’t see them, to them it isn’t hip hop.
Others go the other way. They’ll tell you that if you only do that, you end up looking like every other hip hop dancer. So they disregard the foundations almost completely and say, I’m doing hip hop, but my way. I’m doing me.
Here’s what I understand after all this time.
So this guide isn’t about learning and reciting all the basics. It’s about understanding some principles first. Your natural way of moving. Your natural way of playing with the music. So that you can fully embrace the foundations and integrate them into your dance, and you’re the one doing hip hop, instead of the style doing you.
My goal is to give you more clarity on this, by starting with understanding you as a dancer, rather than memorising more steps.
WHERE YOU ARE AT THE LAST PAGE
01
Which way you naturally move, organic or technical, and what that means for the way you should be practising.
02
What you’ve been fighting in yourself and trying to fix, when you should’ve been building on it.
03
Exactly what to work on for the next three months, and why it’s that and not something else.
Everything on this page came from you.
WHAT DANCERS SAY
These are comments on the videos this guide is built from. They are not reviews.
THE OFFER
one payment
Exercises
4, in order
You end with
Your own dancer profile
Video
Full foundations training
Format
E-journal, yours to keep
Refund
30 days, one email
Get the practice guide, £27
Instant access. Thirty days to decide.
THE GUARANTEE
Do the four exercises. Answer the nine questions. Fill in your profile on page twelve.
If it doesn’t show you something about your own dancing that you didn’t have words for before, email me and I’ll refund you in full. No form to complete, no reason to give.
I would rather you did the work and asked for your money back than left it sitting unopened in your downloads.
QUESTIONS
Is this a video course?
Is this for beginners?
I’ve been dancing for ten years. Is this too basic?
Is this only for hip hop dancers?
What if it’s not for me?
ONE LAST THING
You’ve probably been fighting it. Because somebody told you it wasn’t technical enough, or wasn’t clean enough, or wasn’t hip hop enough, and they probably meant well.
The foundations aren’t there to replace how you move. They’re there to go inside it.
You can start it today with one song. What you write in it is yours.
Get the practice guide, £27