Last week the DAN visited Arts Arkade in the heart of London’s West End for a pilot workshop on judging methods. We welcomed 10 participants from different dance styles (Hip Hop, House, Popping, Locking and Breaking) to the workshop.
We began with an introduction to the judging framework for Breaking from Jurskee, who outlined the basis behind this approach: comparative, descriptive, holistic judgement using the Body-Mind-Soul model of Trivium.
Participants took time to reflect on what they looked for when judging and then mapped these all together onto the Trivium’s Body-Mind-Soul framework. We compared this mapping to the framework for Breaking, trying to identify: areas of agreement across the different and identify blind-spots.
We then used the Threefold interface to judge a house battle and a popping battle. We discussed the nuances of participants’ judgements, potential biases and the related these back to what we mapped earlier.
We explored what counts as the ‘essence’ of each style to explore what differentiates them from the others. We briefly covered the concept of what this ‘essence’ means for the concept of comparing styles directly in All-styles battles.
The pilot had excellent feedback and we look forward to hosting more events in 2025!