II.

OUR HEROES ACTUALLY FIND OUT WHAT RAPPING IS

“We don’t want to go in there, guys.” Said the barman who looked like a student.

“Actually, we are kinda here for the festival.” We said.

Could he have guessed that three young men had visited his city to watch men in waistcoats and shorts dancing about with knives?

We got there just in time to watch our first ever rapper dance. The team was Stone Monkey from ... There was no time to find seats, so we stood close to the action, feeling slightly out of place. However, we soon got into it once the dancing started. One thing that we hadn’t counted on was the flips. These are called “tumbling”, I think, and they add instant awesome to any dance routine ever: flips will always be cool. A great first rapper!

I think that we were fortunate to see Stone Monkey first, as they were followed by Dorset Button who were, in comparison, a bit lack-lustre. Their dance had a theme – Dad’s Army – which they did a little too well: shuffling footwork akin to Private Godfrey and Corporal Jones.

After these two shows, Aled, Kevin and I got a chance to talk to the Stone Monkey team – what I loved about the whole festival is how friendly everyone was – and we found about how the DERT competition actually works. As far as I remember, the teams are judged on a number of different technical categories. We used this information to judge the subsequent rapper dances we saw over the weekend. The categories included footwork, sword-work, acrobatics (air time!) and atmosphere – this is called “buzz” in the rapper world and refers to how the dancers pump the crowd. If the stamping, sword-play and tumbles were not enough to send a beery crowd into whoops of ecstasy, there is one other element of rapper that I have not mentioned yet.

Most rapper teams have a hype-man to introduce them and get the crowd worked up, a tradition that, one would presume, was passed down from the first rapper dances. We can see this kind of thing spanning various genres of modern music: Flava Flav (Public Enemy – “Yeah Boyee!”), Erotic Volvo (Misty’s Big Adventure) and Bez (Happy Mondays). In rapper these characters are called “Tommys”. They are easy to distinguish from the dancers as they have their own distinctive look which can vary from the formal to the thematic or the comical. There are also female equivalents to Tommys: “Bettys”. Bettys, more likely than not a bearded man in drag, add more comic or narrative aspects to the rapper which can be affective if you find pantomime dames hilarious... The best Tommys / Betties interact with the crowd in a spontaneous manner, like a front man would do at a gig, and when it words it really works!

For each team that we watched, we marked them out of five for each category in order to find the best team. This also meant that we focused much more on the dancing and we got a lot of respect from the regulars we shared our ideas with!