Kpop in Melbourne: A Youth Culture Persisting
Originally published in Farrago Magazine
“How much of this do you know already? No, I’ll just repeat it all,” Bomzan begins, as we make our way through the Swanston crowds. “I’m 22, a K-pop dancer, and I’ve been doing covers since high school… It started off with me copying the moves in music videos alone in my room, and then my best friend and I danced together in the school’s empty studios — we were about… fourteen then.” This is a common path for K-pop dancers — the emphasis on dance and accessibility of practice videos online means many begin self-taught. For Bomzan, sharing this hobby with her classmate meant bringing it outside of her room and into the wider world. At the time, her friend’s sister was actively dancing in a crew and planning to enter a dance competition in Sydney: thus began Bomzan’s group cover days. Dancing alone turned into receiving an invitation to compete interstate, followed by regularly producing covers with the team upon their return home. “It might be a bit cringe of me to say but… this changed my life,” she says.
The production and performance of K-pop dance covers in cities worldwide is a strikingly ‘DIY’ phenomenon. Tight communities are formed through this hobby, and with this network, resources such as videography, lighting, speaker systems and post-production editing are shared. Most dancers are self-taught and learn to edit and publish online content themselves. It’s a stark contrast to elitist classical styles like ballet, which require years of (often expensive) training and conformity to razor-sharp standards for performance opportunities. Street dancing — in this case, ‘K-pop In Public’ — allows hobbyists to try out dance outside of these stricter bounds.
Bomzan left her initial crew due to leadership conflicts, but was able to remain dancing in covers due to the connections she had made in the Melbourne community. It was when she wanted to organise a cover of BTS’s ‘Danger’ in 2019, that she entertained the idea of starting a team of her own. “It was like…” she gestures with wide eyes and an incredulous smile, “like woah… because I’d never been a leader before. Like, if there were ever group projects at school I’d always be the quiet one sitting and listening. With Cypher, I don’t know what happened to me. I was so nervous when pitching the idea to (co-founder) Hannah, but it really changed me.”
“Leading a crew and all these [performance] projects has given me so much experience working with different types of people. When I think of myself now, I actually see leadership as one of my primary skills. I use it in all aspects of my life — in work, and in uni too.” To say that Bomzan leads well is an understatement. Towards the end of last year, I danced in one of Cypher’s publics, participating in a fourteen-member ensemble. Within a fortnight, she’d deftly organised roles and standardised choreography, transposed blocking and corrected, corrected, corrected with the coordination only the most experienced of leaders could hope to execute.
Street dance culture took a hit when the pandemic and lockdowns arrived in 2020, as communities were forced to disperse into social isolation. Despite this, Melbourne’s K-pop dancers found ways to connect with their community whilst safely distancing themselves at home. Cypher adapted to these social adjustments when producing their quarantine covers — with individual members recording their dancing from home, Bomzan sending them notes with corrections and standardisations, and their editor Leroi putting the clips together for YouTube videos. They also uploaded dance tutorials, short individual covers and, most notably, a Random Play Dance session in collaboration with their friends from other crews, extending outside of Melbourne as well. RPD is a uniquely K-pop tradition, which brings fans together by shuffling a playlist of song clips to dance to in a flash mob-esque public setting. “Distance was no longer an issue with this online video, since everyone was by themselves at home anyway,” Bomzan explains. “So that was a really fun way for us to bring everyone together, whether they were in the outer suburbs, overseas or interstate with their families, or even the friends we made competing in Sydney.”
She shows me the beginning of the video, which collates clips of dancers showing the time on their clocks or phones. “This made it so we could really all be dancing together, just like an RDP in real life.” Despite their separation during these uncertain times, the community embraced the challenge to remain connected in their shared hobby.
Today, Cypher prepares to compete in Sydney again, and Melbourne’s K-pop community continues to flourish, connecting young souls through shared interests and the opportunity to evolve.