hey hey, more questions for you :D As someone who enjoys dance, what is your opinion on the dance skills and style of each of the Ateez members (especially Wooyoung of course but I'm curious about your opinion on the others also). And also Lee Know if you feel like it 👀 (I'm working on responding to other stuff you wrote but I want to do so a bit more in depth/with more thought! so more questions for you it is :p)
Key words for Wooyoung's dancing are verve, attack, and bold, and his unique trait is being off balance. I don't mean that he can't keep his balance. It's that he's capable of giving his movements an extra kinetic kick by being able to stay off balance, intentionally, to catch the eye, for a bit longer than normal.
All the images I use are from the Ice On My Teeth dance rehearsal.
1. Wooyoung with San and Yunho. I am not using this shot to diss the other two, because in motion they looked harmonious doing it. But in the still cut, you can see Wooyoung got to the 'finished' position, leg completely stretched out, feet flexed, and situated his whole body to the side, to show you the K shape he folded himself into. San didn't commit as hard to the K shape while Yunho did more than San, and neither of the other two got to and held the leg extension. They both did do the feet flex. This is why I say Wooyoung is bold, and has verve.
2. In the first shot, because Wooyoung is in center, he got the privileged arm extension pose while everyone else had to fold in that left arm. Wooyoung used this advantage to make that sexy shape in the second shot, with the right leg extended, and his forearms parallel to do a diagonal uplift motion. You can see Seonghwa (sleeveless) hit the angle with the arms, and Yunho has kept fidelity with the leg position, but again, Wooyoung delivered the most angle as well as an organic sense of motion developed from that starting position. He consistently finds these moments where he attacks the move, to 'win' at it.
As an aside, the thing I really liked about Ateez from the start is that they have some sort of ballet / classical western dance training in there, because in the first shot they all have such lovely plies - not too turned out (bc doing the full 180 turnout would look weird here and get in the way), but just enough.
3. These demonstrate what I mean by off-balance movement. In the first shot, everyone commits to leaning in the same direction, to a pretty uniform degree. The motivating factor for how they reach that angle is different for each of the four in front - Yunho leans with his shoulder, and he's getting his feet ready to move. San puts his weight on that right turned-out leg with the plie, Hong Joong chose to lean backwards using his lower spine and hip. Wooyoung though is bolt upright and off kilter in his lean.
Then in the second shot, you can see that everyone else straightened up immediately after hitting that important 'lean to the right' pose, but Wooyoung stayed off balance.
The third shot is when he's starting to retreat to the back of the line, because Yeosang has popped forward and San is fully turned, doing his step to move on a diagonal, and Wooyoung is still maintaining that 'off balance' movement.
The capacity to do this makes him not just eye catching, but makes the viewer reach for adjectives - Is this swagger? Attitude? I would say that it makes his movements just a little bit spicier when he chooses to deploy it.
I can go on about the others if there's enough interest for someone to send an ask, but I got SUPER fucking frustrated at a) my ignorance of how to make a gif, for one thing and b) how fast their dances are so that like, my favorite move that Yeosang does is impossible to capture in a still bc it goes by so fast, so this is what I will leave you with. I hope this was fun to read and made some sort of sense!
