My hometown of Federal way is sandwiched between Seattle and Tacoma.  In 9th grade I saw a kid pull some liquid - just waves between his hands.

When I got home I researched a bit.  This was back in '99, so everything took forever to download.  I learned the 6 step, the body wave, and the turtle freeze.  O yeah, and the baby freeze too.  One of my goals back then was to learn how to walk around on a turtle... still don't know how to do it, and I think it's secretly a goal still.  I can still pull coffee grinders, top rock, badly formed front hand springs.  Have always wanted to do backflips, never did em.  Back in my bboy prime, I could pull a string of 5 windmills.  Have always wanted to learn flares.

I only knew one bboy at the time - a childhood friend.  For some reason he and I started getting into it at the same time.  We got the cardboard out and would hurt ourselves, like all good bboys do.

Anyhow, I remember learning the figure 8 a couple years later in high school from a raver friend of mine.  I remember how hard it was to get that hand NOT to go on the inside the first coupla days.

I went to only a few raves in high school.  I sported white gloves, kikwears, and a visor.  I remember loving the speed of d&b, but I can't, for the life of me, remember how I danced.  Probably a bunch of liquid on top, a bunch of loosely connected glides with my feet.  Probably danced a lot like all the other ravers, just better : )

College came, I offed to New York to study something else I loved - theater.  In my theater studies, did quite a bit of study in movement.  I did African dance, French Court dance, physical improv, and viewpoints - a type of theatrical movement study.

For the most part, I stayed away from the dance scene in New York.  I'd occasionally watch the bboys and poppers of Union Square, but for the most part, I was intimidated by all these incredible in your face dancers.  My experience in Washington was that people were chill about the way they danced, and in New York, they were all about bringing all that they got.  I wasn't turned off to dance as much as I didn't feel like I fit into this particular style.

Sophomore year I saw a dude ripping digitz in a bar.  Blew my mind.  I don't remember the guy's face, but I remember his fingers twisting and turning.  I saw it and I realized I wanted it.

We talked, he taught a bit, and I went online to research.  Found this video:

http://www.youtube.com/v/uoa9NU70lTE

Yeah, the digits in particular in this video killed me.  I practiced these techniques, but I don't think the whole liquid thing clicked until much later.

When it did click, I was high as a kite.  This was right after the matrix reloaded, and I thought my hands looked like the sentinals:



I was like painting with my hands.  Anything that was happening in my head was happening right in front of me - my hands were mediating my mind.

And once you find it, you can't let it go.

First video I made was a Google video:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1229955585217270745

Heh, I called it finger dancing.

Then the next video:

http://www.youtube.com/v/fH7rwR9jQyE

Now, I'm a little weirded out by how hot this video has gotten.  I think a lot of it's success comes from the fact that it's the earliest video tagged "digitz" in the youtube library, which I guess counts for a lot in their search engine algorithms - if you search digitz in youtube, you get me at the top hit.  There are lots of videos out there that to a better job at showing the dance style off, this video just happened to get lucky.

Anyhow, I started to get interested in the mediation of dance - how it's videotaped, and how it's viewed.  Here are a coupla dance inspired videos:

http://www.youtube.com/v/I8swQuuk6AA

http://www.youtube.com/v/_TDP5XtZRBw

http://www.youtube.com/v/8V2K0tKYQUo

And then more dance videos:

http://www.youtube.com/v/tQR-0WRyRFQ

http://www.youtube.com/v/40dxtkyLC94

And now I'm back to actually learning the craft.  I think a lot of what happened when I started making videos is that I forgot why dancing was fun.  I kept comparing myself to what I thought was proper technique and I stopped exploring, I stopped trusting that if I explored that I'd land into exciting new territory.  I guess, in a lot of sense, I lost a load of confidence.

Media does that - it takes your 3d presence and shows it to you in 2d.  My problem was that I believed in it.

So yeah, that's about it for now.  I'm still exploring tangential ideas related to dance - virtual spaces, imagined environments and objects.  But... I mean, let's be real - I've turned into a thinker and less of a doer.  So I've made a commitment to start doing again.

Werd