You know amateur camcorder stuff from a guy fully zoomed in at the very back of a performance venue, shaky and full of ambient chit chat and noise.

They got a huge boost in popularity with their appearance on So You Think You Can Dance and I was reminded of how awesome their stuff is.

In case you don’t watch SYTYCD they were nominated for a 2009 Emmy for their choreography on that show and even credited with the creation of a genre of dance known as lyrical hip hop.

Here’s the Emmy nominated performance:

and some more of their crazy work on SYTYCD:

and something from a little while back in ’07:

I think Ivan & Allison are probably going to kick butt on this show. They’ve both progressed so much and they work well together. I’m impressed with their joint effort. Especially Ivan since hiphop is more his style than modern lyrical.

Together they rock a crazy show:

Anyways, it is a free all ages event where every Friday they start off the night with free lessons from a handpicked local instructor. So Free Dance Lessons everybody! Summertime is always wedding season too. So if you’re the stumbling groom, here’s a nice place to take your soon to be wife and practice!

Tonight was the Rumba, but coming up are the Waltz, Ceroc (Jive/Salsa Fusion), West Coast Swing, Jive, Swing, Social Foxrot, Tango, and Salsa.

This runs till Sept 1st and the full schedule can be viewed here.

Here’s the blog for explorAsian

The big kick off will start tomorrow and the 6th with the Canadian premiere of Welly Yang’s “Finding Home” a broadway play featuring an interesting mix of songs from Elton John, Lee Ann Womack, Tim Rice, Dan Hill, Luther Vandross, Billy Joel and more. It’ll be at the Alcan Theatre.

Another one to watch for is Cheuk Kwan’s Canadian premiering “Latin Passions” which is part of his long running “Chinese Restauarants” series of docu-dramas. If you’ve seen any of his other Chinese Restuarant pieces, you’ll probably agree that it’s quite a genius way of exploring the cultural impact of the Chinese diaspora worldwide. This particular piece “Latin Passions” as the name suggests takes a look at places like Peru, Brazil, and Argentina. All his other documentaries that are part of this series will be showing throughout the month as well.

Not only are there events every day but there are also multiple events, so I’m sure there’s something for everyone.

I think I’m most impressed with Style M and Zero Nine from the crew. Anyways I found a few videos of them.

This is for a commercial they’re doing. Not only is the dancing impressive but I love the stark contrast between traditional and modern interpretation of Canon In D.

The mixture of using a DJ and a Beatboxer (From the Expressions Crew) mixed in with an orchestra using a Kayagum (Korean zither) which looks a lot like the Guzheng (Chinese zither) — very impressive.

this one is more focused on a solo Zero Nine performing.

Here’s one I found on google, I think it’s done by the crew themselves. Quite a professional documentary I might add.