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All posts for the month January, 2012

I'm guessing a lot of you have caught on by now - yes, at one point in my life, I was a bboy. 1992-1994 to be exact. It was my first style. I began bboying with my little brother; some of you probably know of him as Naytron from Headhunters and Renegades crew. In 1993, I got into a freak accident that involved a q-tip, Naytron, and a fair amount of blood. I remember it like it was yesterday. We were on vacation in the Philippines. I was cleaning my right ear with a q-tip when I heard my bro approaching the room. I wanted to give him a scare, so as soon as he walked in, I quickly turned around and shouted "boo!" Somehow, I hit my head on the wall, and little did I know, I forgot to remove the q-tip from my ear. Basically, the bump pushed the q-tip all the way down my ear and completely destroyed my eardrum. Blood gushed out. Anyways, enough making of you guys uncomfortable. Stupid me never got treated for it, and I lost about 30% of my hearing in my right ear due to the accident. I was lucky it wasn't more. When I got back to the states, I noticed that bboying was much harder than I remembered. Eventually I found out that the accident also affected my inner ear, and thus my equilibrium. I lost a lot of my natural balance and my ability to do spinning bboy moves (i.e. windmills). After a year of struggling with bboying, I eventually quit. Actually, because of my little "disability," it took me a long time to learn how to do the spins that I do when I dance house. You know what though? Nothing can stop you if you really want to achieve something.

Here's a picture of my bboy crew, Headhunters. Naytron is the one wearing a Ruby Lynn shirt. She's our little sister who passed away almost 5 years ago. The crew was established in 1999 and in 2008 several of the members were becoming inactive until we came back stronger than ever to audition for America's Best Dance Crew in memory of my sister. But I'll save that story for another day.

If you have any interesting dance stories, leave a comment and share; I'm interested to hear what you have been through.

Sam wrote:

Hey Jardy, I have another question. Some of the house dancers I really like, such as yourself, Serial Stepperz, and our local Seattle Circle of Fire/SoulShifters, come from a bboying background. Can you talk a bit about how you've mixed some elements of (bboying) footwork and power into your house, what works and what doesn't in terms of staying true to the feeling of house?

House is the kind of style where you can add pretty much anything to it as long as you stay true to the house feeling. My suggestion if you want to add bboying to your house is to make it so that your bboying matches the style of your house dance. You don't want to look like there's an obvious switch between two styles; you gotta keep your flow. What I do is I keep my bboying short and sweet - a flare here, a swipe there, coffee grind to dolphin dive, it's all good. Oh, and ending all your bboy moves with a dolphin dive seems to help flow back into house, too.

Between 1993 and 2000, my primary style was hip hop dance (aka Newstyle). I was on-and-off during those years - I'd take a year off here, a few months there - well, you get the idea. In 2000 I got into Soul Sector. The group was going through some major changes at the time, losing the majority of its original members. I was the first member in Soul Sector who had any real choreography experience, so the group pretty much got reinvented and did more stage shows after that. I created this trailer in 2001. 10 points to the first person who can pinpoint my appearances in this video.