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- Introduction
- Para Para information
- My Para Para routines
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- My music games blog
- My PP routines' blog
☆★ ParaPara in Japan ☆★
| What is ParaPara | ParaPara in Japan | ParaPara the game | Eurobeat |
ParaPara is a solo dance which debuted in around 80s in Japan when European disco music made it to Japan. At the beginning ParaPara wasn't that popular in Japan. The boom actually started in late 90s when a pop idol Takuya Kimura from SMAP performed a Mickey Mouse March routine on TV.
ParaPara is a solo dance as I already said. But that doesn't mean that it is danced only by one person. With solo I actually mean that there is none or almost none interaction between two people (or more) dancing. Each person does the same specific moves at once. The moves for each songs are given and this pack of moves is called a routine. ParaPara is danced to upbeat music like Eurobeat. Later on ParaPara started to be danced to Techno music (TechPara) and also Trance music (TraPara).
This kind of dance became popular in more countries then just Japan. It is popular mostly around the Pacific Rim. But people do ParaPara (mostly France) also in Europe and United States.
In Japan there were six clubs producing their own official routines. 9LoveJ, SEF GOLD (Velfarre), STAR FIRE, TWINSTAR, Xenon and Area. Nowadays only 9LoveJ, Velfarre and Star Fire are still "open". I speak only about these clubs because the routines danced all over the world come from these clubs. There are many ParaPara clubs in Japan but you dance to the official routines from the clubs above. You don't even dance to Para Para Allstars or ParaPara Panic! or other earlier ParaPara routines.
To be let to such a club you usually have to be more then 18 years old. Some clubs require you to be an adult (20 in Japan). Clubs where you are let without any age requirements are few but they do exist in Japan.
In the clubs there you either dance to the already known routines or you dance some maniac routines. Maniac in this case means that you dance as you wish coming up with whatever moves you can think of (or just regular moves on a song which does not have any official routine).
The club staff comes up with new routines. Then during the night there are lessons of these new routines. (once per week for example). Other routines are sold on club DVDs but they don't usually have too many copies of those DVDs.
KONAMI also released a game named Para Para Paradise. This game is based on the type of dance called ParaPara. It is a music game from the series BEMANI like Dance Dance Revolution, BeatMania or Pop'n Music. In the game you will find officially released routines from Para Para Allstars 1st Mix and 2nd Mix. You can learn those routines in training mode where the videos of the routines are showed. After you learn them you can play in Game Mode, where you will only see scrolling arrows which reminds you of the move you are supposed to do and when you are supposed to do it.
There is also possibility to do the maniac routines. You just need to switch the difficulty from ParaPara to Normal, Hard or Expert. Then you can do whatever you please or you manage to do (with so many arrows on the screen...^_^).
If you are a paralist you surely know and maybe even like eurobeat. Do you wonder where it came from (most is sang in English)?
Eurobeat comes from Italy. At the time when people first heard this kind of music, they were told that this is italopop. It started in early 80s, in late 80s it started to turn into eurobeat. Several years later super eurobeat was born.
Music of this genre is fast pacing and it usually makes you feel happy and lightheaded. The BPM is between 150-170. Singers are both male and female.
The person we should keep in our minds and a person we should really respect is Giancarlo Pasquini. He is known to most of us as Dave Rodgers. This is the man who introduced eurobeat to Japanese audience. First he composed scores for Namie Amuro (famous Japanese singer). Later on it was him who also sang the melody of his own compositions. Japanese people love his songs and they wanted more. This way more eurobeat made its way to Japan. Mostly because Dave Rodgers gave the chance to other eurobeat composers to be heard by the world.
Dave Rodgers is a fine composer, vocalist and more importantly also a producer of a big part of all eurobeat produced (A Beat C). We should give him all our thanks, because without him, there wouldn't be even ParaPara.
Datum poslední modifikace:
-00:00 29/11/2010 S'Tsung