September 30th, 2011 by soul4dance

Dance Central is a music video game for the Xbox 360. This game utilizes the Kinect motion peripheral. The game was developed by Harmonix, who are the creators of Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises. The game disc has about 32 songs already installed and have created about 240 songs which can be bought online.

Game Play:

Here the GamePlay involves the performing player re-creating the dance moves which are tracked by Kinect and represented on the screen by one of the eight in-game avatars. The game has more than 650 dance moves which span across 90 dance routines. There are five modes available:

Perform It: the regular single player game play mode, where the main objective is to complete the dance routines to get the highest score.

Workout Mode: this is an extension to the regular mode in which the number of calories burned is also tracked, along with the workout time.

Dance Battle: here two players compete in a head to head dance routine battle. The person with the highest score is the winner.

Challenge Mode: once all the songs in each difficulty category have four starts on each one, a challenge based on the difficulty is unlocked. This mode increases as the difficulty increases.

Break It Down: this is a practice mode which allows the beginners to learn more advanced dance moves in a step by step process.

December 27th, 2010 by soul4dance

Chuck “Baba” Davis, founder of Dance Africa, and Brandon “Peace” Albright and his multicultural dance troupe, Ill style & Peace Productions in Dallas for the Dance Africa weekend festival.

Over two consecutive afternoons this past week, the SMU Meadows Division of Dance had the privilege of meeting and working with two internationally-acclaimed names in dance: the legendary Chuck “Baba” Davis, founder of Dance Africa, and Brandon “Peace” Albright and his multicultural dance troupe, Illstyle & Peace Productions. The artists are in Dallas for the Dance Africa weekend festival, sponsored by the acclaimed Dallas Black Dance Theater.

Chuck Davis, a scholar of all forms of African dance, founded Dance Africa in 1977 after performing with several premier African dance companies. In addition to Dance Africa, he founded the African American Dance Ensemble in 1983 and continues to teach, host and participate in African dance festivals around the world. Joined by some of his closest friends and students, Davis, who exudes a captivatingly positive energy, taught an empowering, drum-filled session with SMU dancers on Wednesday afternoon.

Philadelphia-based Ill style & Peace Productions is a multicultural dance company whose work has been fusing the spirit of old-school hip-hop with various styles of African dance since 2002. With their emphasis on peace, love, and unity through the common movement of dance, they led SMU dancers in a challenging session Thursday that encouraged risk-taking and a strong sense of community among everyone involved. Both Dance Africa and Ill style are performing this weekend in Dallas’s Dance Africa Festival.