Daisy Sornabala, leader of Hip Hop Breakdown showing off her moves. Credit: Courtesy of Phillip Bradshaw
Students can get their groove on with the RPAC’s latest fitness series “Hip Hop Breakdown.”
The series is a free three-week virtual workshop running March 31 through April 14 that aims to teach students a hip-hop routine, as well as the foundations of picking up choreography. The hour-long choreography lessons will be Wednesday nights at 6:15 p.m. and will be led by Daisy Sornabala, a fourth-year in psychology and a dance fitness instructor at the RPAC.
“I want to project to our participants that you can pick this up at any age or experience and just give them a little taste of hip-hop and dance,” Sornabala said.
Students will be learning a one-minute hip-hop routine to Cardi B’s “Up” based on choreography from Brian Esperon, a dancer and choreographer with more than one million views on TikTok and YouTube.
“I found him through social media, and his choreography is really fun and current,” Sornabala said. “He choreographs a lot of the TikTok dances, so I found a really short version that he did, and it was a clean version of the song.”
Alice Adams, manager of Group Fitness LIVE, said Sornabala plans to give Esperon full credit and share the link to his original video. She will break down his routine into steps that are easier for the audience to pick up on.
“Daisy’s bigger goal is to give participants the tools and confidence to make the movements their own,” Adams said.
Sornabala said the choreography will be split into seperate sessions, which will be progressive and build off of each other. In the first week, she said she will teach the themes of dance she finds important to learn choreography, such as learning the counts and getting in touch with the rhythm of the song.
The last week of the class will focus on performance and confidence to ensure that everyone knows the dance well, Sornabala said.
Because the classes are progressive, Adams said students are not allowed to join if they missed the first session of choreography. The last day to sign up is Wednesday.
Adams said the RPAC has offered a class teaching choreography in the past, but this workshop will be much more inclusive in helping students of all experience backgrounds to pick up the choreography.
Aliyah Valdez, a graduate student in higher education and student affairs and a group fitness administrative associate, said the RPAC wanted to create an event for students to enjoy while the semester is winding down.
“We figured that this dance workshop would be the most exciting to finish out the semester as people are going into finals week, and we just wanted to give them energy and something to look forward to,” Valdez said.
Sornabala said her goal for the workshop is for students to gain valuable dance skills that they can use as a starting point.
“I just hope to give them something that they could build off of since they will have this choreography and continue to improve on some of the dance moves that I taught them and feel inspired to learn more,” Sornabala said.
Students can sign up by visiting the Group Fitness LIVE website.
