Dance2XS Purdue – West Lafayette, IN – April 23rd, 2011
(also the birth place of the RainDodgers Crew!!! Be exciteddd….)

ReFresh Dance Crew at Northwestern University – Evanston, IL – June 5th, 2011

Dance2XS UIUC – Urbana, IL – October 23rd, 2011

Also a guest appearance of performances by Random Pieces, featuring additional choreography by Teddy Chavez and Matt Pumanes

Animation Dance Troupe at NIU – DeKalb, IL – November 29,2011

In 2012, A LAP Dance workshops will be expanding to more college campuses, so keep an eye out for these opportunities to take classes with some of Chicago’s choreographers. Interested in booking A LAP Dance Workshops at your college campus? hit me up!

Rot10 had the booth set up selling all kinds of new dope shit, my favorite being the “thats when she swallowed” tee lol. i got to see this design when gino showed us all the designs in vegas before they got printed.

just to clarify, yes that is a swallow roosting on the right side of the shirt lol. also, we have THE dopest rot10 brand hangers, blankets, gloves, and yes, even oven mitts.

i also learned through the help of Dance Central for the xbox kinect, that i fail at following all kinds of directions. fail one, you would think its pretty easy to stand in the right spot for the camera to see you, cuz the little graphical representation of you shows up in the corner of the screen. fail two, why are the people dancing doing so many things at the same time. seriously? i didn’t come to the rot10 booth to dance. fail three, i freestyle when i feel like it, not when there’s a break in the dance central remix of paparazzi. sorry gaga, nothing personal.

there are two videos of our performance on youtube that ive seen so far, i like this one the best…its taken from the balcony

since i didnt even look into my wallet until the next day, i didnt discover that all the money had been jacked. i mean, thats what happens when you leave all your shit zipped up in the side of a busted ass black bag kept under a coat under a chair upstairs in the performers dressing room. dear thief, thanks for only taking only my money instead of stealing my credit cards, driver’s license, car insurance, very valuable miscellaneous food and gas receipts, and the three bandaids i carry around.

and, andrew baterina’s people at homegrown were ridiculously dope. big ups to them for winning.

in short, someone i used to look up to and respect called me out publicly on facebook (thats about as fuckin public as it gets) for “limiting myself to one style.” of course i choreograph in one style – my style. its fake as hell to choreograph like someone else. so in true passive-aggressive retaliation, i made this piece, exaggerating the stuff that is most MY style, and limiting my outside influences.

if you’ve listened to the lyrics of the song (or seen the hilarious music video, which you should), its about cee-lo who has given everything for some girl, but she still doesn’t care about him. i give so much of myself to my dance career, and for someone who i respected to be shitting on me is pretty damn serious. the best thing you can do is just put a cheesy ass grin on your face while saying ‘fuck you’

so fuck you im gonna keep doing me. hate me haters. keep feeding me.

Teddy’s class:
beastly fuckin piece. i wake up sore the next day in the thighs and side no matter how many times ive done it. i also somehow managed to cut myself on my shoe (??who does that???) last night at rehearsal doing this piece

and my class from a couple weeks ago:
teenage dream, this was the class that got turned into the vid w davina in the previous post. as soon as manilastar tweeted about casey / teddy’s class i asked if they had my video and it was up in a day. go manilastar! i totally sucked in the short film, and i like the way it turned out in the vid from class better. so look at this lol.

andrew, gino and davina and i did this video shoot the next day using the choreo that i taught for my workshop. before we did the shoot, we hit up a taco bell, which now in addition to “fire” sauce, also serves some green salsa and barbecue flavored hot sauces, in packets. not really important at all, and not even remotely related to this post, but i thought it was worth sharing.

there’s all kinds of bloopers of me fucking up my own choreo lol. but if anyone out there wants to get a video made, hit up andrew. he’s a beast with videography stuff, if you didnt know.

tomorrow is the first day of monsters of hip hop. ive been told that i need to go. and, i’m going.

im not sure what to expect from this experience, i have a feeling that all these badass dancers are gonna show up from chicago, the midwest, zanzibar, and cleveland and make me look like a fool. itll be my first monsters, which is why im kinda nervous, but also really excited because a bunch of coda is gonna go too. im also relieved that i dont have to stress out about coming up with a witty / novel halloween costume, although i totally have an awesome one that im gonna use next year.

and there’s also a 3 hour rehearsal for coda on sunday after taking a billion and seven classes throughout the weekend without getting fed every 3 hours like my body demands, which is gonna kill me. and theres gonna be a sleepover, where i WILL NOT be watching any scary movies.

my car had been having SERIOUS problems recently, and for some reason whenever i drove long distances, the low oil gauge thingie kept blinking. that, and also there was an enormous fuckin pool of oil under my car in the garage. i got it repaired after i got back from urbana, and apparently i had been dripping oil hardcore, and had been running on the last few drops. im always afraid of my car spontaneously exploding into a giant fireball of death and fire and explosions. when xayarath told me i had to meet him in aurora to leave from there i was afraid my car would straight up fail on me. somehow i made it without the giant explosion death fireball thing from happening.

once you get out of south side chicago, everything immediately turns country. for some awesome reason we decided to take local for a majority of the way. at some point, we started seeing a long row of slowly flashing red lights, and we were driving right into that alien abduction beacon. apparently they were just a whole bunch of windmills (? really?) with blinking red lights to freak out city drivers in the country.

we roll up in front of the club and find an AWESOME parking spot, then we get a phonecall that our person needed food…the gps i brought with me was basically total poop, since it told us that there were all these awesome restaurants nearby but werent actually there. eff. i guess dunkin donuts is 24/7? and they serve food food (as in non donuts)? who knew. we drove back around and our spot was still there haha. badassery.

so between me being cheap and chris being ghetto as hell, we figured to stop in at a jewel before we left so we could buy alcohol so we wouldnt have to buy any at the bar haha. …and, we started drinking in the parked car before we show up at the club. in an effort to be cheap without missing any part of the show, we just basically chugged shots. a bunch. but i also forgot, that this is urbana and drinks are way cheap, because apparently beer pours out of the water fountain in every city outside of chicago.

Dance2XS UIUC was first up with this awesome performance…i told domi their director that they could use my choreo to bet i bust that i taught a month or so back. and they totally did the piece justice, i was really happy to get to see that piece done on a group, and done so well and entertaining-ly. check out the whole set!

preurb was a lot shorter than i expected it to be, but i had a fun time. i also bought a bunch of drinks at the bar anyway, not because i wanted to get shwasty faced or because i was thirsty, but just because i was excited about how cheap the drinks were lol. hittin up pita pit afterwards and crashing out in vicki’s dorm room. awesome.

bob evans makes some serious breakfast. and there are also a lot of old people, and a lot of balloon-animal-maker people. well, there was only one ballon-animal-maker person, but thats one more than you would expect in a given restaurant.

we hit up this hipster-populated country themed taco joint with delicious but mad overpriced stuff to eat / drink in wicker park (7 dollars for a bottle of matilda?? hellll naw). the first thing i do is find the BEST parking spot in all of northside Chi, about three cars into the first side street past the place. after i put down my BADASS sonoran hotdog

(yes, there is chili and bacon on that fragment of pure un-fuck-withableness)

we go back to the cars to get to rehearsal. as im walking to mine, i see my water bottle is laying out on the grass. huh, weird, it mustve either

a. magnetically attached itself to my leg as i got out of the car (impossible)
b. teleported on its own will (extremely difficult, but technically not impossible)
c. been dropped after someone busted my driver side window and jacked all my bags and shit (three cars into the first side street off of 6 corners in wicker park? apparently, more likely than either of the above)

shit that i lost in order of value:

1. my camera, a christmas present from my parents, my kodak zi8. the ironic thing about this being stolen is that i keep it in a sock literally so no one will steal it. i had all my pictures of ke$ha from that one time when we met. well, we didn’t technically meet, but we were in the same room. along with 17,000 other people at the allstate arena. but you know how it works with super famous people. sometimes im just too busy to meet everyone.

2. my black, gold and white zebra print radiis. how awesome is it that the second most valuable thing i carry around with me is a pair of shoes. but damn, i need those shoes for the show we’re doing tonight for the bruno mars and fat joe concert at the house of blues. (post about this to follow! but no pictures or video from the concert, because, well you know why.)

3. backpack that i found in the basement of the red dragon (the house i lived in when i was in evanston.) as you may recall, the basement looked like a scene right out of slumdog millionaire, and people tended to leave all kinds of stuff there, including their dignity. the backpack had all these extra straps and clips and hooks and dirt stains, so it mustve been expensive.

4. a portable cooler, something that i won from the weekend raffle at the red rock casino and resort in las vegas over the summer. “portable cooler” sounds pretty damn sweet, and when they told me i won i was like “man how am i gonna carry this back on the plane with me.” in my mind it looked as radical as this:

(foreign brand beers and generic “cola” brand cola included)

in reality i won what was a lunch box

(approximately life size)

5. diamond encrusted gold plated socks. file that shit up, insurance company.

maybe the coolest part about this whole experience is seeing how the glass shatters into about a billion and a half tiny little pieces after you drop it on the ground. AWESOME.

come see CODA open for bruno mars and fat joe at the house of blues tonight!

1. i am really uncomfortable outside of my element. thankfully i went with some people i knew, otherwise i mightve exploded out of excessive self-consciousness. which would not have been attractive. AT ALL.
B. a little alcohol in the form of fruity margaritas goes a long way in making your hips roll the salsa way. apparently i roll my hips too often/frequently/inappropriately so if i intend to do salsa, i need to be stone cold sober. but see point 1.
D. i keep learning the basics from people when i tell them “ive never taken a salsa class before” but i always forget that stuff. i can’t use that excuse anymore
IV. I FUCKIN LOVE GOOD SALSA. mostly the food that goes with chips, but also the dance is dope too.

design recently brought in kentrell newton from swagger crew to teach this smooth-as-ice routine

first of all, props for the dope class + choreo + clear instruction. most importantly, props for thinking that the word “swagger” looks cooler instead of the edgy misspelled version that is the biggest played out cliche in all of hip hop dance.

SWAGGA. ugh.