My Story

Humble Beginnings as a Math Nerd

For the first 19 years of my life, I was a math nerd. The closest thing I ever came to winning a battle was when I came two points shy of winning the state math meet. Let’s just say I was an unlikely dancer!

I Begin to Learn Popping

When I first discovered popping, I lived in a small town in the middle of nowhere in MAINE, the state at the top-right corner of America. There were no other poppers that I knew of within an hour of where i lived. I saw a few videos on the Internet–this was years before Youtube–and I knew that I had to learn.

I literally spent weeks searching google until I found an instructional video by a guy named Poppin Pete, a guy who later became my teacher in real life! I practiced this video for months, watching two, three, four times a day, just trying to learn to do this dance.

I loved it so much. All I wanted to do was talk about popping, watch popping, do popping. It was just popping, popping, popping.

I move to LA to become a dancer!

Eventually, I moved out to Los Angeles to be around all of the original poppers. Myself, PopnTod, J-Rock, and MaddChadd moved into a house together and it was just all popping, all the time. Every night we had poppers over and we watched footage and got down and just lived, breathed, and ate popping.

Teaching online

After we all moved out and went our separate ways, I realized that I now wanted to teach popping. But I wasn’t interested in teaching at a studio in LA or trying to promote myself to do workshops. From what I saw, everything was moving on to the Internet. What I liked most about the Internet was that kids in small towns in Maine, and small towns in Peru, and small towns in Australia all had access to it. I could teach them. I could share what I had learned as I travelled around the world, learning from all of the top OG (original generation) poppers.

When I first had this idea, I was still really shy and afraid of being on camera. I had a dance group at the time called Elastic Illusion and we all felt that the dance scene was too serious, so we started making videos aimed at a more mainstream market. We wanted videos where people could learn and laugh at the same time.

Our videos were very successful. We’ve got tens of thousands of subscribers on Youtube and tens of millions of views and we’ve sold thousands of DVDs. It was a wonderful endeavor, but this too came to an end.

Real Popping for Poppers

I realized after that experience that my strength was giving REAL information, teaching REAL popping to REAL poppers. I was interested in students who loved popping like I did. I wasn’t that interested in converting the mainstream and telling them how great popping was. I wanted to preach to the choir, to the people who were up all night watching popping clips and trying to figure out how that dude did that one crazy move at 1 minute 42 seconds into the clip.

I *know* popping. I think I am the biggest fan of popping I’ve ever met. I’ve traveled around the world meeting all the major dancers from all over America, Canada, France, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Germany, and on and on and on. I’ve studied with all of them, picked all their brains, asked them every question I could think of, and my goal is to share what I’ve learned with you.

I Want to help you make YOUR dreams come true!

One last thing about me. It is my mission, my goal in life, to inspire people to believe in themselves, to believe in their own dreams, to follow these dreams, and to just go for it! Just give it a shot! Just keep working hard and keep practicing and keep believing!

I was *really* bad at this dance when I started. I was the stereotypical white guy. I had never danced before and had very little rhythm and even less coordination. I was stiff where I should have been loose and loose where I should have been stiff. I was shy and off beat and awkward and the only thing that kept me going was how much I loved the dance.

BUT I LOVED THE DANCE ENOUGH TO KEEP GOING! Eventually, one day, I saw one thing I did that made me go WHOA. And then another and another. Every time there were things I didn’t like but more things that I did. And the saga continues…

The blessing was that by being bad myself, I really learned how to do everything. None of it came naturally. So I know exactly how to explain it, because I really LEARNED IT! The dance never stops and there’s still always more to learn.

A teacher is just a student who is farther along the path and can show the way. In every student is a master waiting to be born!

If you let me, I will unleash the master popper in you!

I love hearing from all of you! Whether you’re a beginner or a better dancer than me, please feel free to write in and introduce yourself! You can also say hi and share your feedback in the comments section as well.

KEEP IT POPPIN!
Professor Otis