Louise

- AUTO ETHNOGRAPHIC PROFILE -

For my autoethnographic experience, I tried dancing to J-pop idol group dances so see both how hard it was and what it was like. I found that it was quite hard. I picked two songs that I had previously watched my friends dance to on stage, which were two songs that stuck out to me as being fun and memorable. These songs were Koi Suru Fortune Cookie by AKB48 and Ultra Choco Beam by Wa-suta. I tried another song but found it way out of my level range for dancing. All songs were by Japanese artists but I still feel like they are able to show the same high energy dancing that Korean artists portray as well. Also all of the K-pop songs I found also seemed to be out of my dance level range.

I only ended up filming half of each song due to my low energy level due to being sick, but I found the dancing quite fun, the first time I filmed Ultra Choco Beam, I found myself wanting to continue. The songs were quite high energy and unlike western music videos and dancing that I am used too. The dancing was also quite childlike and feminine including lots of hand near the face moves and love hearts and closed fist dancing. To learn the dance, I followed dance covers for both of them as you can see below:

When comparing the two, J-pop and K-pop dances the J-pop ones that I danced too were much more childlike and feminine while the K-pop ones leaned towards sexy and feminine.

I also found that some songs have a dance only version without the little normal music video bits in the middle. Both the dance covers I used were shot outside which I know is a common place to practise for Idol groups as the cost for a studio is quite large. The Mews_AU group plus other groups often practice in front of the ICC due to its large open space.