Here are some performances I’d love to see in person or on video. I may eventually try one or more of these myself.
I’d love to see a yoyoer perform a routine choreographed to their own yoyo-centric spoken word soundtrack.
I’d love to see a yoyoer improvise a performance while backed by a live jazz band.
I’d love to see a yoyoer develop a martial arts inspired set of “yoyo katas” that incorporate increasingly difficult levels of tricks, and which require moving around the stage and switching between front-style and side-style.
I’d love to see a trained dancer, especially from ballet, incorporate yoyo into a dance routine.
What are some yoyo performances you’d love to see?
Sounds like a rather boring 3 minutes haha. I’d rather see yoyo move in more the direction of actual PERFORMANCE and stage presence than “oh look a double rejection that only the most hardcore of yoyoers will recognize”
I’m definitely an advocate of designing a routine to fit the evaluation standards and I’m not suggesting they change.
But if we move even further in your suggestion are we evaluating yoyoing ability or choreography and movement?
Imagine a diving contest where the winner didn’t have the best dive but they did a sweet dance before jumping so they get a better performance score. Is that the best diver?
Yeah, the Bulls may have 98 points to the Celtics 105, but the Bulls had some slick looking plays so we gave them the win.
I’d also say apart from the high level players that evaluating based on performance categories leads to more homogeneous routines, not less. You can basically expect certain elements in everyone’s performance at this point.
And again I hate when people say “so and so shouldn’t have won” because everyone knows what they’re being judged on, don’t complain after the fact. But I think it’s fine to suggest how judging might change. I think we’re in a good spot right now as far as balancing performance and tech, but it definitely puts certain people at a slight disadvantage by emphasizing skills that aren’t directly yo-yo related.
I agree that we need an objective way to score yoyo routines, but unlike basketball and diving, yoyo is very much a performance “art”. It IS about looking flashy onstage. That’s the whole point of yoyoing.
Many of my favorite yoyo performances are not from competitions. For example, Black in Cirque du Soleil, or his TED talk, Jensen and Charles’ A-RT videos, Shu Takada throwing down to a live DJ in a club, etc.
That’s a very subjective perspective that could lead to things like saying an Eli hop is better than a Takeshi tech combo. And we have AP divisions, so clearly the current contest system acknowledges that yo-yo as a performance art is a separate category from competition yoyoing. Artists don’t compete with other artists in contests to see who’s best.
Are we evaluating people’s yo-yo ability or their choreography skills? There’s room for other types of contests and more contests hosting AP divisions, but if we’re going to say someone who won a contest is the best yoyoer in that state/country/the world, and not the “best yo-yo performance artist” then I don’t think you can say the point of contests is to reward a “performance art.”
I think that this should be revised to say “attempts to acknowledge”. Mainly because the performance art aspect seems to be so important to standard competition yoyoing as it is currently judged.
Yeah they definitely emphasize the the performance aspect to the degree you can have a perfect tech score and still lose, but we haven’t gone so far that you can do all performance oriented tricks without any difficult tech and win. I just think that calling yo-yo a performance art in the context of contest yoyoing isn’t accurate.
And I have strong opinions on a lot of stuff so I expect people to disagree a lot. At the end of the day it’s just words, and especially on here it’s just yoyos.
