Favorite Dances with Eli from The Silver Words (SBPT)

This summer, We Live and Breathe Books (Kiersten in particular) is participating in the Summer Blog Promo Tour hosted by The Book Bratz! That means, every Sunday in July and August, we'll be hosting a different blogger to spread the love.

Today, Eli from The Silver Words and Kiersten are going to share some of their favorite dances, which is especially appropriate since National Dance Day was yesterday!

Eli's Picks

Hi everyone, and thanks to Kiersten for hosting me today! One of my non-reading/writing interests, dance has been something I’ve been interested in since I was little. I can’t dance myself, but I love watching it, especially hip hop and lyrical hip hop. Here are some of my favorites, in no particular order. If you love any of these dances, or if you have your own to recommend me, don’t be shy and talk to me on Twitter at @thesilverwords :)

iKON - 6 Foot 7 Foot

iKON is one of my favorite kpop groups, and their performances have amazed me since they were trainees. This dance is from when they were competing in the show WIN: Who is Next as Team B, and I love the way that they perfectly synchronized with the music. They work together as a team brilliantly, and they always look like they’re having fun.

Dumbo & Lawrence from Poreotics - Silhouettes

Even though their concepts aren’t the most original or awe-inspiring, Poreotics still manages to wow me with their dances. This has been one of my favorite dances for a long time. It’s elegantly simple, and even though it’s pretty short, it captures the talent of both Lawrence and Dumbo.

Melanie & Marko - I Got You

This dance is from So You Think You Can Dance Season 8, and with it, Melanie and Marko were cemented as my two favorites from that season. They’re both incredibly talented, and I loved the stories that they were able to tell through their dances. This one especially meant a lot to me, and I was glad that they were able to perform it.

Cyrus - Holy Ghost

Admittedly, part of why I love Cyrus so much, as opposed to other amazing poppers, is because of his personality. I admired the way that he persevered and made it so far in So You Think You Can Dance Season 9, and his amazing attitude throughout it all. His Dance for Your Life performance was what brought it all together for me, and I was rooting for him throughout the entire competition. If you’re just as impressed as I am, allow me to recommend this one :)

I Am Me - S&M

Before I Am Me, I was completely partial to Quest Crew. Quest is flashy and fun, but I Am Me won me over with their heart and their incredible ability to work as a team. The illusions that they create are stunning, and their performances are always powerful. This one is one of the many great ones that they did while competing in America’s Best Dance Crew, and I was so proud of them when they won.

Kiersten's Picks

I'm not sure if I've talked about it on here before, but I started dancing when I was 6-years-old, started competing at 9, and even after graduating from high school and retiring from competitive dance, I still dance and choreograph for a dance organization at school. I've done many different styles including contemporary, ballet, pointe, modern, hip hop, jazz, tap, musical theater, and I even took a beginner ballroom class at school. Basically, I've always loved to dance and watch dance. I was supposed to pick five dances to round out this top ten, but I'm going to cheat because I DO WHAT I WANT.

Wade Robson - Ramalama (Bang Bang)

This dance happened in the first season of So You Think You Can Dance, and I'm still not over it. I'll never be over it. This is just one of those dances for me that I'll forever think is absolutely brilliant. It was so different from anything I'd seen before when I first saw it, and I still love it all these years later.

Kyle Hanagami - Iron

I'm working on a dance project in the fall for my friend's honors capstone project, and he's been sending us some of his research so we can start seeing the style for the piece. This is probably my favorite of the dances he's sent so far. The thing I love about this one is that it's so compelling - even when I don't plan on watching it all the way through, I just can't pull my eyes away until the end.

Tricia Miranda - Bitch Better Have My Money

This is one of my favorite hip hop combinations of all time. The great thing about this is how different each group looks doing the same choreography. While I love really precise dances (I'll have one lower that's really tight), there's something so great about looser dancing like this. Also, these people hit this choreography SO HARD. Goals.

Royal Family - FRONTROW

Ok, so I know this is a ten minute dance, but I promise that it's totally worth it. This one was choreographed by Parris Goebel, who you might recognize from Justin Bieber's Sorry music video (Aka the music video that actually made me like that song. Like, I'm so obsessed with the dance that it makes me like the song more. I learned a lot of the choreography from the video, so now I ALWAYS want the song to come on so I can wow all my friends by doing the dance). Anyway, this dance has so many different flavors of hip hop in it, and they're all executed so well. I can't imagine how it must have felt to be in the audience for this.

Since I mentioned watching dance in the audience, I just wanted to add a little bit of my two cents in on that because it is partially related to my next dance pick. I personally feel like there's something that's so much more magical about watching a dance live. When the recital at my dance school was coming up, all the dance classes that happened at the same time would usually come together and show their dances as practice for the performance. There was this one dance from another class that I really loved watching - the choreography was so great, and there was this feeling in the room when they did the dance. Of course, I've since then watched the dance on the recital DVD, but it's not the same. There was something about seeing that dance in person, in the rehearsal space, that added to it - something about watching it up close. From a distance, some of the magic was lost.

Kate Jablonski - In This Shirt

I could go on forever about this dance. This is honestly one of my favorite dances of all time. I think about it almost everyday (I'm not kidding). This is choreography goals to me. Contemporary has always been my favorite style, and I absolutely love this kind of choreography. The dancers are so committed and precise - they dance with such beautiful abandon. The video above is the one posted on the choreographer's YouTube channel, but I'm also going to link to a video of the dance at a competition because I feel like seeing it straight on like an audience would gives an entirely different perspective to the choreography. I'll never get sick of watching this. If I could go back in time and redo anything in my life, it would be making sure that I was in this dance.

So this was originally supposed to be the end of my picks (aka sticking to just five) but then THIS DANCE HAPPENED ON MONDAY NIGHT ON SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE, AND I WOULD BE DOING A DISSERVICE TO YOU ALL IF I DIDN'T INCLUDE IT OK. I'm sorry for yelling.

Travis Wall - Send In The Clowns

I will admit that this one is a bit strange, but it's absolutely beautiful nonetheless. Travis Wall is always brilliant. This is definitely my most artistic pick on this list.

Now Let's Talk More About Me

Like I mentioned above, in the past two years of college I started choreographing for the dance organization that I'm in. I've decided that I'm going to share with you guys some dress rehearsal videos of the dances I choreographed! You can look for me in the videos - I'm the one with the dark hair with blonde underneath, if you can see it.

Atlas

This is the first thing I ever choreographed! It started out as a combination for a workshop, and then I decided to do a full dance with it.

The Fall

After choreographing Atlas my sophomore year, I choreographed two other workshop pieces before I did this one last year. This one was especially fun to work on because I decided to play with a lot of different things happening at the same time. Rehearsals were often confusing, but I think it ended up being pretty cool!

I'm going into my senior year, and I'm hoping to choreograph again this year! I also have this idea for a duet that I want to potentially collaborate on to make a properly filmed version, so hopefully I can make that happen.

If you want to check out some of the workshop combinations I choreographed, you can check out the first one here and the second one here (I sprained my ankle a few days before teaching this workshop, so it was a struggle).

Anyway, I hope you all enjoyed this dance post! While it is entirely unrelated to books, I know that Eli and I really enjoyed working on it!

Do you like watching dance?

What are some of your favorites?