How to Dance to Dubstep | Hip-Hop How-to

What's up? My name is Matt Steffanina and today I'm going to teach you guys how to dance to dubstep. Now, the first thing to know when you're dancing dubstep is that there's not as much of a groove in it as there is when you dance to hip-hop music. It's a lot more isolated and this is a chance for you to really show off your animation skills.

So, popping, waving, tutting, ticking, strobing, slow motion. All these effects are perfect for dubstep. We're going to go over a couple of them today and the first one is slow motion and speed changes. So, anything that you would normally do in a hip hop freestyle, you can do in slow motion to dubstep. Because it has all of those wow and those different sounds, you want to really listen closely to your music and to the patterns and find moves that you can accentuate with quick moves and then go back to a slow pace.

We call this style "warping." And it's characterized by a really quick motion at the beginning, followed by something really slow. For instance, if I'm walking forward and I want to add some warps in there on the beat, I can take a step, slow motion, onto my left foot and warp to the right. You want the warp to be really quick with your chest and you want to stop it. But what's going to happen at the end of it is that my arms are going to keep going to the left, so that it looks like my body created this slow motion with my arms.

Same thing, here. If I'm stepping forward again onto my right foot, I can take my torso to the left, knock it and then have my arms come in slow motion across. You can play with this effect in any direction.

There's one more isolation that we're going to work on today that you can practice in dubstep and that's isolating your shoulders from your head. The first thing we're going to do is rock our shoulders side to side. You want to create the illusion that your head is staying in the center. To create this illusion, we have to push our head the opposite direction that our torso is moving.

So, as I push my torso to the left, my head is going to pull to the right. It's important to practice this step in front of a mirror because it's hard to get a feel for what you're actually doing. Once you can rock side to side, you're going to also go front and back and eventually, you're going to make circles with your shoulders.

This is difficult to see when facing straight on. So, I'm going to bend down so that you can see the circles. Now, when you're going around in circles again, we want our head to stay in the center. So, whichever way your shoulders and your torso go, your head is going to push the opposite direction to create that illusion.

You can mix this isolation in with your warps, your other waves, your ticks, your pops and all your other animation skills. Just remember the most important thing is to stay on beat. And with dubstep, you have a lot of sounds to play around with.