What is transition? Here is what the Dictionary quoted about transition "Passage from one form, state, style, or place to another". Transition is going from one passage to another. How do we get better at transition within the art form of popping? I remember in the '80s I did a performance at a famous ballet school (located in Chicago, Il, USA), my performance was called UDO (unknown dancing object). A guy that teaches popping at the time asked me how does I connect all the moves so fluidity. At the time I could not really tell him. I was young and I wasn't thinking about this dance on that level.

So how do you get good in transition with this dance? Anybody new within popping needs to really think about this very seriously. You can do the tut move, wave move, etc, but that doesn't make your dance flow from one move to the next smoothly.

I believe the first thing we have to look at is what is the important of this dance. What are the things we really need to learn to become good at popping? Since this dance is a popping dance, we have to become good at hitting. You can read popping 101 for more details about hitting. We also need to learn the structure of popping. Poppers are a looser robots, we evolved on this structure. Robot is the structure of popping. So it is important to learn the basic of robot ting. Now you can hit, and do the basic of robot dance. Within this art form hitting, dime stopping, posing, just to name a few are what we used a lot when making transitions in our movements.

See, we have to practice doing transition to know how to do transition. Here is an example on transition. Lets do a basic hitting style (people today call this Fresno). Let’s shift from side to side on 8 counts with a double hitting on each side. On the 8 count make a transition to some other move. You have to practice doing this in your practice sessions. So every 8 counts with double hits do a transition to another move.

I’m going to take you through this process, shift your whole body to the left, do two hits on the left side, then shift your whole body to the right and do two hits on the right side, then shift back to the left and do two hits and shift your whole body back the right and do two hits. On the last hit start stepping forward while you are hitting.

We are going to focus on an 8 counts hitting then transition to other movements. We are going to focus on just moving around with our dance. So in this practice session you just want to do step outs, walk forward, and do 90 degrees twist-O-flexes. Do the basic hitting style again then start doing the step out after 8 counts, then go back to the basic hitting style and then do a 90 degree twist-o-flex. You have to have something that you go back to in this dance. More advanced poppers have developed their hitting style or dance within a popular hitting style (boogaloo, boppin, strut, etc). That is your style that you pretty much sit in the pocket with. You keep coming back to.

Try to flow right into the next move. I know it isn't going to feel good at the start but with practice you will become good with this over time. You want to stay on pace and flow from one move to the next.

Now you have the basic of how to flow on an 8-count system within popping. Now you want to break the flow in you dancing. This is when you can do poses to set up for a change in flow with your dance. You can also slow the dance down with dime-stops and go from a fast pace movement to a slower pace movement. This is just a basic breakdown of how to do transitions. It's much more to it; I just wanted to explain it from a basic standpoint for novice poppers.

I always start out my practice session with me just listening to the music for a while. I'm standing there with my eyes close just letting the vibe of the music. You really have to feel the music when you are dancing. Your transition is base on how you feel the music, if you don’t feel the music when dancing; it is going to make doing transition very hard. It's your connection to the music and from this connection you are expressing it via your movements. So the first process of how to learn how to do transition is to feel the music. Once you feel the music, go through some of the basic steps above.

Article written by "Space Capital" referenced from 4dapoppers.com