My Flow Arts Story

Throwback to my very first glorbiting video with an Orbite from Emazing Lights and 1 mode gloves.

This is my flow story!

I bought my first pair of gloves from ACEN (anime convention) in May, 2014 after my friend told me about gloving randomly one day. I lost one of the gloves that night and ended up dancing around with 1 glove and an LED pacifier. A month or two later, I bought crappy gloves off of Amazon and would dance around waving my hands in cool patterns, not realizing gloving required more intricate movements. Around October 2015, I began finding gloving groups on Facebook, joined them, and started going to Emazing Lights hosted events. My ffjend also told me about Emazing Lights selling gear and I bought my first pair of one mode gloves. I then recorded my first video of me dancing around my living room with my karate uniform while waving my arms around to create cool light trails. In January 2016, I saw Allazo dancing around a dance studio orbiting and was inspired to go to Emazing Lights, purchase my first orbit, and danced around my living room with my orbit. Shortly after that, I saw that you could use your gloves and orbit together and thus started glorbiting. I soon after found the Facebook groups for orbiting. After watching many videos/tutorials and practicing a bunch in my living room, I began posting videos on Youtube. After I left my job, I was stuck having to work a lot and found myself unable to attend events, meetups and shows. I wanted to find a way to get involved in the community while still pertaining to my goals of performing and in May 2016, I booked my first live glorbiting performance in Chicago. I went to a few open variety shows and even got the opportunity to give a light show with one of my literary performances. In August 2016 with less than a year of glorbiting under my belt, I won my first local talent contest. I then found myself in another rut having to work a bunch and was unable to book any live performances or interact with any flow artists, but now it's time to give time for me and my passion for performing and have 3 live shows booked in a month span.

I may be a fully self taught flow artist, I may see flow arts through a different lens with my stylistic views, I may be taking an alternate route with my flow arts compared to what I mostly see around and I enjoy where this is going. I hope to continue to post videos, perform live on (Chicago) stages, win talent shows, and my want list is to maybe get sponsored by a light show or orbit company and become a part of a flow troupe/team while expanding my knowledge of flow arts. I also hope to attend more fests and flow meetups!

What's your flow story?

https://youtu.be/FlnPEv0KLZM

Making Your Mark in Light Trails

In the beginning of 2014, one of my friends told me how he did this thing called “gloving” at raves. As fascinated as I was by this concept he described to me, about a month later, I attended an anime convention, ACEN, and saw vendors selling these light up LED gloves and bought a pair for 20 dollars. Shortly after ACEN, I began experimenting with this “gloving” thing, dancing aimlessly in my room, looking in the mirror, and trying to move my hands around to make cool light trails. This lasted for about a year or so, until my same friend told me about a company that sold better quality gloves, emazinglights.com. About 40 dollars later, I was the proud owner of my first real pair of gloves.

One of my biggest dreams is to have one of my products (blogs, websites, or youtube channel) go viral. I had a golden idea to one day record myself dancing around with my gloves to the song “Decisions” by “Bogore”, an electronic dance music artist, while wearing my karate uniform. A couple months later, while bored at my last job in a grey box, I was randomly curious if there was a community in Chicago for this type of thing. Surely enough, it didn’t take long to find one thanks to Facebook. I watched some youtube videos to get a better idea of what this “gloving” thing was; it required intricate hand, arm, and finger movements in specific patterns. In the youtube videos I watched, I noticed people were only showing their performances from the waist up, but something about that didn’t feel right; my creative mind told me to use my whole body with the gloves as the star. The more I watched youtube videos and tutorials, the more I noticed top glovers using their entire bodies in shows. A video that stood out to me, which I watched while bored at work, was a video of a very attractive man in a dance studio with this thing called an orbit. Looking at that video, I instantly gravitated towards the orbit and bought one from Emazinglights.

Me and dancing have had an interesting relationship over the years. I only took dance lessons when I was 4 and quit basically right away, but for some reason, at ages 8 and 9 when I went to theater camp, I was assigned more dance intensive roles instead of lines and singing. A year after that, my martial arts career began. Whenever I’d go to bar and bat mitzvahs and there would be dance offs as a teenager, I’d often win. During college, my sorority participated in a philanthropy dance contest as a group, which I did every year I was in the sorority. Unfortunately, when a “certain someone” made fun of me for dancing, my confidence went down the toilet… until I decided to invent my own style of dance with the help of youtube tutorials. I also saw a video where someone used their gloves and orbit together and adopted the idea into my dance routines. Once I became comfortable enough, I began trying to see if I can take this to the stage. Luckily, a group named “Dramageddon” accepted one of my videos as an audition and I got to perform with them 3 times. I am still looking for more opportunities!

I also like to perform in local “Got Talent” shows, as it is another dream of mine to be on America’s Got Talent. I’ve done a few local talent shows as a storyteller, but continue to lose to singers (and dancers). I’ve always wanted to do something different for a talent show, as opposed to “doing what everyone else does”. If the audience wants singing and dancing, they’ll get singing and dancing. With these LED light gloves and this LED light orbit, I will make my mark in this world, as well as beat out the singers, one glimmer of light at a time!