Dramatic peaks in dance routine are synced to dramatic peaks in music.
There is a priorization choice to use only easy moves. Only the jump at 2:10 is demanding. In parapara, this "easiness leeway" makes the dance accessible to masses of people at clubs. This video harnesses easiness leeway to focus on body language and role acting.
There are also two explicit signs of parapara. At 1:24, there is a full sweep. At 00:30 - 00:45, the girl group performs "girlified parapara" - instead of doing symmetric X:es, they only do only one line of X. Instead of doing a straight, geometric lines as far as their hands reach, they keep hands bent. This makes the move smaller in size and more relaxed, resulting in more feminine and less dominating body language.
Status signaling
There is a clear hierarchy among the 4 young men. In the very beginning, the two young men display alpha devil-may-care attitude by throwing away the speech papers and by unharried pimp walking. Faster speed expresses higher relative status: higher-status men run circles around others.
There is just one explicit dominance/submission scene at 2:10. Elsewhere already-high-status alphas voluntarily and autonomously carry out their roles to serve even-higher-status ones.
In the end, the groom softens his touch with some vulnerability game. At 1:54, he hurries to his princess to save her from the sternous effort of walking, but backs off at the last moment with a mischievous slap on vaginal area.
Regarding age-appropriate activities, men in their 30s should be doing graduate studies, starting families and companies, learning martial arts and investing, but not dancing. Dancing in the nightclubs is appropriate for people in their early twenties.
Therefore I emphasized the fitness angle: Since you have to put in the hours anyway to stay healthy and fit, pole dancing is just as good way to do it as any.
Male pole dancing is for homosexuals
Let's face it: most male pole dancing clips in YouTube are damn gay. I prepared for probing questions about my sexual orientation by using opportunities to emphasize heterosexuality, the last time being 5 posts ago. Fortunately pole dancing is so unknown that this never came up. It is much easier to convince that I am not a 20 years old stripper girl than to explain "No, I am not gay despite having abysmal sexual track record and being interested in dancing."
Nobody forces you to send stripper vibes by doing deep squats, rubbing yourself against the pole and removing your clothes. Also nobody forces you to send gay vibes by dancing topless and spreading legs clothed in Latex pants while high-pitch disco music plays in the background. There are plenty of other styles. It's all about what you want to express.
Pole dancing is what strippers do
The most common counterargument goes something like this: "Once I saw a movie where a stripper was leaning against the pole for support while doing deep squats and shaking her ass, with thick wads of cash portruding from her mail stamp sized strings and fuck me boots in her feet. What are YOU doing among THEM!?"
First of all, the single message which pole dancers try to get across to broadcast media reporters is that pole dancing is not striptease. This is visible in various What Is Pole Dancing pages, which invariably emphasize its roots in Chinese circus acrobatics.
I wonder if these people have never gone to a strip club to demolish the glamorous and sexy images which movies attach to striptease by seeing how grim and frivolous places they are in practise. Or have they patronized porn bars often enough to see performances which are actually good? Anyway, my experience is that and you can be lucky if you see a few elementary level pole dancing moves. Strippers end up looking sexy in the same way as Anssi Kela is touching: They are so blatantly manipulative that counterreaction exceeds intended reaction.
What you won't see there are gymnastics and acrobatics which are typical to pole dancing:
Summary: This post lists the rules which give parapara its distinctive look. The rules are described on a level of abstraction where they can be applied to pole dancing.
Parapara is a japanese dance style which emphasizes hands. Various organizations publish official parapara routines for dance songs popular in Japan. Everyone dances the same way. Some dance clubs hold parapara evenings, where people gather together to dance the song routines, which they have practised among friends or at home from official videos.
In parapara, the primary goal is to synchronize moves with music. Dancers do similar moves when similar musical patterns are repeated in the song. The moves closely reflect the rhythmic structure of the song.
This maximal synchronization has been achieved by emphasizing choreography for the whole song. Each move is precisely timed, for example "the next full sweep will last for 4 beats".
The moves are very simple. Simplicity is a priorization choice. It enables rhythmic synchronization, since simple moves can be done quickly. It also enables emphasis on routine for the whole song, as dancers don't need to practise individual moves. The moves don't need strength or flexibility. Speed requires some practise. You may not be immediately able to reproduce all moves from a video, but when someone shows them in slow motion face-to-face, not a single move poses any challenge.
Parapara moves have lots of straight lines, round swirls and symmetry. Usually either the moves are symmetric along vertical or horizontal axis, or they are followed by 'mirror moves' which complement symmetry.
Finally, parapara moves have the same clarity as a single beat of a drum. Sometimes you can see if a move is correct or wrong, just like you can hear extra beats among repeating drum pattern.
In parapara, human body becomes a visual rhythmic instrument which complements musical rhythmic instruments.
It is a mystery for me, why most dancers ignore the rhythmic struture of their songs. It seems to be a kind of 'dog whistle' which is hard to see for some, while for others it is an elephant in the room.
For example in SubTV's Dance program, Turo Kankaanpää's dance moves are well synced to the rhythm, and one commenter notices it. However, the judges didn't comment on it at all, even if one commented positively about the immersion and appeal it created. In Dance, the first round can result in 3 outcomes: rejection, pass or a second try in group choreography round to get more data. Turo went to the choreography round.
In some dance traditions, sync is so secondary that the song can be just switched to another at will. This would be unthinkable in parapara. Also when talking about parapara, for example Paula doesn't get it:
Paraparaa tanssitaan yleensä eurobeatin, trancen tai muun jumputuksen tahtiin, mutta oikeastaan sitä voi tanssia mihin tahansa rytmikkääseen musiikkiin. Paraparassa ei ole tarkoituksena sheikkata peppua ja näyttää seksikkäältä - päinvastoin! Tarkoituksena on oikeastaan vain heilua puolelta toiselle ja käsillä viuhoa sarjan mukaan.
What would it mean to apply the rules of parapara for pole dancing?
Search for positions like the half flag or pole sit, where hands and feet are free to do parapara-style patterns.
Practise how to do easy moves with accurate timing (for example a fireman spin for 4 beats).
Practise how to do a series of quick transitions between easy positions.
DON'T practise sexy & lusty move from striptease tradition as they are not in line with parapara's abstract & flirty body language.
DON'T waste time in practising individual difficult tricks.
Went to my first pole dancing class. There the sharp-witted Iina taught various spins, including the fireman spin. At home I had only tried climbing and static holds, so spinning was new to me.
The poles in the studio are static chrome poles. I have a titanium pole, which has both static and rotating mode. The friction is different in different poles. Chrome has linear friction: the harder you grip the better your hold. This makes spinning quite easy from the very first try. On the contrary, the friction in titanium is binary - either the grip holds or you slide quickly to the ground. I just can't do any spins on static titanium pole at home. Luckily rotating titanium pole is the easiest option of all.
The difference between the gymanst's bar and the dancer's pole is that one is horizontal while the other is vertical. The versatile sport of pole dancing combines striptease-influenced sensual dancing and gymanstic circus acrobatics. Next I'll present videos from three pole traditions - striptease-influenced pole dancing, mallakhamb and Chinese circus.
This is a good combination of acrobatics and striptease influences:
At 0:15, she's first doing a split and combining it to striptease-style leg-waving.
At 0:32, more split variations follow.
At 1:15, she's doing a cartwheel and some handstand walking.
At 2:10, leg-waving upside down (!)
Mainly women practise Western pole dancing. In contrast, Chinese pole acrobatics needs so much strength that you only see men doing it. The aesthetics is about quick, explosive transitions and grace instead of cute sensuality.
The Hindi word Mallakhamb means "pole gymanstics". The influence of yoga is visible, when the man puts his leg behind his neck in Sirasana style.
Women do Mallakhamb with ropes.
This last video is from an American pole dancing competition. It is the most striptease-minded, but what I've seen in strip clubs is nothing like this. In theory, I'm all for sexually explicit dancing. In practise, the few times I've gone to strip clubs the strippers have mainly rubbed themselves against the pole and done a few swirls. They rely too much on naked skin. If I want to watch sexy dancing, I'd rather go to some electronic music event, where some girls put effort into dancing well. Wearing stylish clothes enables them to stay in relaxed mood and put up much better show.
In Friday, I was in a pre-Christmas party and Miss Pole Dance 2009 was held next door. I expected something like in these videos, but the overall level was quite low. The venue, Be-pop, was the tackiest nightclub I've seen anywhere. In general, pole dancing in Tampere seems to be about tattooed prole girls doing striptease gestures and basic gymnastics in 15cm tops and 10cm pants.
At some point in my life, I got bored of drinking beer and went to the dancefloor, gradually developing a way to move my body to unknown rhythm, especially at electronic music events where dancing is the main thing and dancing alone isn't creepy as in discos.
Then I found the parapara style, and it was love at first sight. It is a Japanese dance form where the emphasis is on simple and fast hand movements, there are ready choreographies for songs and everyone dances in the same way. It is one of the few dance traditions that can be directly applied to the modern dancefloor.
In India, my standard daily routine after work was to go to gym and stretch hands by repeating parapara videos. When I returned to Finland, I taught myself improvisation with any music by just playing something on Winamp and doing some parapara moves.
Nowadays, I got zero inhibitions to go to the dancefloor with confidence. I wasn't making just any pick-up attempt, but trying to find a dance partner.
There was a time when "Saanko luvan?" was a standard opening. But judging from the really repulsive vibe that I got from the evening, and the complete lack of positive reaction on their behalf, this approach is by today's standards too enthusiastic and crude and has to be preceeded by complex and unintuitive things like personalized negging.
Today, I started the evening by drinking with a friend. Then he went home, and I continued to a disco (no proper band was playing, and I wanted to dance instead of just sitting and sipping bear alone, which is boring).
One woman made eye contact with me and danced as my counterparty for some minutes. She was over 40 years old, clearly past her reproductive age.
No younger woman made eye contact with me during the evening, despite the fact that I spent a lot of time in the dance floor and in some cases the imbalance between men and women was big to my advantage. There are 2 possible implications: 1) My sexual market value is very low, and women instantly see it or 2) I have no idea how to make contact with the opposite sex in drunken bar situations, and this lack of skill is crippling my ability to start relationships.
