This time I'll tell you about my dance hobby. Some might think what dancing has to do with media but here's the catch: social media plays a big part in this specific hobby. I'm talking about "odottemita".
Odottemita is a japanese term and it means "tried to dance". Basically odottemita is about learning a choreography, filming it and uploading it to YouTube. Think of it like this: You learn the choreography for Michael Jackson's "Thriller", film it and upload it online. You've done an odottemita video, congratulations!
That's basically odottemita but in reality odottemita is mostly just Japanese songs with choreographies made by the Japanese. I think there might be the same situation than with the word "manga", in Japanese manga means all comics in general (including Donald Duck, Tintin etc.) but in western countries manga means just Japanese comics. So maybe for Japanese people odottemita means that you can dance to any kind of music but in western countries it points specifically to the Japanese music. Well, this is just my theory, since I have never seen a dance made to western music being labeled as "odottemita".
There are three ways to learn an odottemita dance:
1. Japanese pop idols. It's very common that Japanese pop idols have dance choreographies for their songs. Almost every song has a little choreography. The problem with learning from these idols is that usually uploading your dance cover to YouTube can be tricky since the songs are copyrighted.
2. Learning from another odorite. Odorite means a person, who does odottemita. One of the nice little things of odottemita is that you learn from other dancers like you. Because a big part of odottemita is sharing your videos to the world, you can find new dance covers easily. If one choreography catches your eye, you can learn it and upload your own version online. Other odorites are eager to see you interpretation of a dance!
Above you can see Kamen Liar 217's choreography for a song called "Onegai Darling" and Yakko's cover of that same choreography.
3. Do a choreography yourself! That's rigt, making a choreography is not limited to pop idols, professional choreographers or famous odorites. Anyone can do a choreography, even though the song has a popular or official choreography already!
Above you can see Kamen Liar 217 dancing a cover of a song called "Dive to Blue" (official choreography) and then another choreography of the same song made by IG. I couldn't find a better example but as you can see, same song can have many different choreographies.
Odottemita wouldn't probably exist without the online part of the hobby. Nico Nico Douga (a service like YouTube, but Japanese) and YouTube play a big part in making odottemita the hobby it is, since they're the two biggest websites for odorites to upload their videos. In addition to using video services, a lot of odorites and odottemita groups have their own Twitter accounts, blogs and Facebook pages. Through their pages they connect with their fans and other odorites, share their videos, advertise their upcoming live performances and even sell fan merchandise.
Odottemita is not a mainstream hobby in Finland, but there are a couple of dance groups and soloists. It has been gaining popularity in the Finnish anime convention scene both dancer-wise and fan-wise. I'd say we're living odottemita's golden era right now in Finland! I hope things only get bigger from here. In Japan odottemita is on a whole different level though, people can actually make money out of it and some odorites and odottemita groups have become pop idols. We're a long way from that, but I think things are nice the way they are at the moment.
I hope this shed some light to the world of odottemita!
Happy thoughts,
Oona
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