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5 reasons to join a dance crew
Being a dancer is an amazing way of life. It gets even better when you have the right people by your side to share the experience. We present 5 major reasons why you should find a crew.
1. Your crew's like family
“Your crew is your family” sounds clichéd but there's truth in it. A crew, in the traditional sense, are a bunch of people that grow together over time because they share a common passion – the dance. In this regard crews are something that evolves slowly. Usually they start out as a group of friends that practise together. As soon as the core is established the rest falls into place. People that are similar to the crew’s mentality and lifestyle gravitate towards the crew and might eventually become part of it.
Friendships that evolve this way are usually deep enough to reach outside the dance world and you can count on your crew-mates in every situation you might need a hand or an ear.
2. Collective knowledge
Whenever you have more people in a group, everyone brings their own knowledge to the table. This is true for dance, but equally so for all other topics. One guy in the crew might be an acrobatics expert, while another one understands musicality and flow. Both can learn from one another and lift the level of the group. Different ages and life situations bring various insights that wouldn't be available to a group that only consists of people of the same age.
A crew member might need help sorting out their life after a break-up, for instance. For sure, there'll be someone who's been there and can give advice. Can't get a new app working on your daughter's smartphone? Ask the younger generation of your crew. Still can't do that headspin? Ask your crew's power-move expert.
B-Boy Lilou in the cypher
© Nika Kramer/Red Bull Content Pool
3. Motivation
Being a dancer and honing your craft to the point where we can call it an art form is a lifelong journey. While you can certainly say being on that journey is already a great achievement, there are moments from time to time where we all feel like we're not progressing. This can hinder us from doing our training and developing our skills.
When you have a crew, there's always someone else who has loads of motivation and pulls the others along. Alone you might skip practice. You might dwell on thoughts about being not good enough. But don’t you dare doing this alongside your crew-mates. They'll pull you on the dancefloor and engage you in a cypher. They'll challenge you with practice routines and crew games that will instantly bring back your fire.
4. Team-mates for battles and competitions
This is the reason that comes to mind first for a lot of people. Whenever a battle or a competition is not one vs one, you need team-mates. There's nothing wrong with picking your partners in crime as you go, but having your crew-mates at hand has several advantages over dancing with someone else. As you practise with your crew-mates a lot, you know their strengths, weaknesses, their arsenal and the way they behave in battles. All of this information helps you to react in a more strategic way to what happens on the dancefloor.
You'll have plenty of routines and choreography worked out together with your crew-mates and you'll be able to leverage that to spice up your freestyle performances. When you dance with anybody you have to develop that stuff in preparation for the battle. With your crew-mates, you can work on improving it, because it's already there.
The Red Bull BC One All Stars
© Nika Kramer/Red Bull Content Pool
5. Inspiration
The people you practise with have a big impact on the way you dance. Their different ways of moving, the energy and the general approach to the dance are things that ignite your own creativity and help you shape your own style.
Just practising together with someone who has a higher energy in their dance than you will show in your moves becoming more energetic too. Seeing your crew-mates ride intricate rhythms inside the music will make you more aware of them in the first place, as well helping you use them yourself further down the road.
Through this process most crews develop a common ground in their way of dancing that manifests as the crew’s style. This doesn't mean everybody in the crew dances the same, but that the members share a common understanding of how things are done.
