Killer Choreography

If someone types ‘difficult choreography into the Google search bar, most of the results are going to have Kpop in the name as shown below. I even had my roommate, who has a deep personal hatred towards Kpop ever since her brother came back from Korea and would force her to listen to it, to double check my search results to make sure that they were not biased. They were not. (Here are screen shots of the results below.)

One thing that it seems any Kpopper can get a nonKpopper to admit is that Kpop has some noteworthy dance moves. Some may argue that it’s the difficult and unique choreography that has been aiding in the steady increase of views of Kpop music videos over recent years.  When Kpop was first starting to develop, many routines were heavily based on traditional dances or didn’t include any choreography at all. However, in the early to mid-1990’s, the influence of western music and dance began to flood Korea and the choreography of Kpop began to morph into the art form it is today.And funnily enough, western music doesn’t really include dancing the way it did back in the early to mid-1990’s (the entire era that influenced Korean choreography). Three main styles of dance make up the core of the Kpop choreography world; B-BoyingFreestyle, and Hip-Hop.

It may be called B-boying in Korea but break dancing originated in the Bronx, NY in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.maxresdefault B-boying became a staple in the U.S. choreography industry and influenced more modern modes of dance, such as hip-hop. It consists of the top or up rock, footwork, spinning moves (power moves), and freeze.  A prime example of a Kpop group that is probably known for using B-boying the most, is JYP’s Got7 who combine B-boy with martial arts to add flair, appeal, and uniqueness to their choreography.

Freestyle originated from the early days of disco in the 1970s on street corners and public places where dancers would show off their improvisational skills.

Some performances are choreographed or partially choreographed, but improvisation is the main force behind freestyle and many people prefer the freedom of Freestyle dancing to other conventional types of dancing.
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95ae75135d24fec867c0989ddc6a68c3The roots of Hip Hop were informal and group-based, but today the art form has become so popular that audience cultures informal performance venues started developing during the 1990s. Popular hip hop dancers can not only ‘rock a club scene, but they can also mesmerize an audience of dance experts or wow national television audiences.

So, the real question remains… what Kpop group or Idol has the most difficult choreography? There is no unbiased source for this information so I watched thirteen very different countdown videos for most difficult Kpop choreography with over 237 choreographies in all thirteen videos. And because no list is ideal, some videos were male groups, some were female groups, some dated back to a few years ago and some dated back to as recently as a month ago to balance each other out. I also looked at different list people made online, but at least with videos, I can see the dances too, so I promise I did my best to make the lists as fairly as possible and they will probably be out of date by the time I finish it. With that many videos a person is bound to get a couple different answers, so I’ll have two lists.The first one, (list 1) will just be groups who had multiple songs throughout the different videos the more videos a group or an Idol had and the more often each video appeared the higher their rank will be. The second (list 2) will be the songs and groups that appeared the most often and they won’t be ranked because there are a lot of ties for some of these songs.

List 1-groups with the most difficult choreography based on how often and how many of their songs appeared.

List 2-Songs that had the most difficult choreography based on how often they appeared.

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