Hip Hop Dance - Main Styles - Popping

Popping

Popping was created by Sam Solomon in Fresno, California and popularized by his crew the Electric Boogaloos. It is based on the technique of quickly contracting and relaxing muscles to cause a jerk in a dancer's body, referred to as a pop or a hit. Each hit should be synchronized to the rhythm and beats of the music. Popping is also used as an umbrella term to refer to a wide range of other closely related illusionary dance styles such as strobing, liquid, animation, and waving. Dancers often integrate these styles with standard popping to create a more varied performance. In all of these subgenres it appears to the spectator that the body is popping, hence the name. The difference between each subgenre is how exaggerated the popping is. In liquid, the body movements look like water. The popping is so smooth that the movements do not look like popping at all; they look fluid. The opposite of this is strobing (also called ticking) in which the movements are staccato and jerky.

Popping as an umbrella term also includes floating, gliding, and sliding which are lower body dances done with the legs and feet. In gliding, a dancer appears as if they are drifting across the floor on ice. Opposite from gliding is tutting which is an upper body dance that uses the arms, hands, and wrists to form right angles and create geometric box-like shapes. Tutting can be done primarily with the fingers rather than the arms. This method is called finger tutting. In both variations the movements are intricate, linear, and form 90° or 45° angles. In practice, tutting looks like the characters on the art of ancient Egypt, hence the name—a reference to King Tut.

While popping as an umbrella term is widely used by hip-hop dancers and in competitive hip-hop dancing, Timothy "Popin' Pete" Solomon of the Electric Boogaloos disagrees with the use of the word "popping" in this way. Many of these related styles (animation, liquid, tutting, etc.) can not be traced to one person or group. Solomon states "There are people who wave and there are people who tut. They’re not popping. I say this to give the people who created other styles their just dues and their props."