Friidom’s Epiic Movement Mixtape: Finding ways to express our mind through our body.

By Theresa Campanella

Dancer, choreographer, and composer, Dr. Friidom Dunn, validates his style and boundless capabilities through the Epiic Movement Mixtape. As a testament to his work as an artist, Friidom takes us on a visually entrancing journey of developing his original Epiic dance style.

Epiic Movement Mixtape explores Friidom’s evolution as a dancer and choreographer as he developed as an artist and introduced a new, original style of movement to the dance community. In teaching Epiic, he emphasizes the significance of using a malleable dance structure to explore ways for humans to express the mind and individual experiences through their body.

As a dancer, choreographer, creative director, actor, and artist, Friidom has played a role both in front and behind the camera. With roots in ‘Krumping’, hip hop, jazz-fusion, and contemporary, Friidom has created his own ‘misfit’ amalgamation of various movements of dance, molding his own unique style known as Epiic.

With a total of 12 tracks, Friidom is bringing a visually striking production of EMM to the virtual world, showcasing his performances and collaboration with others over the past years.

“It's the journey of a lot of dancers I know in LA through my eyes”

The Epiic Movement Mixtape is the hybridization of contemporary, hip-hop, and improvisational dance style intertwined with both theatrical and cinematic exhibition. Offering an insight into the world of an artist as they develop, connect and collaborate with others and spread their knowledge for future dancers and creators.

Through the Epiic Movement Mixtape, Friidom expresses his journey and experiences as a dancer in Los Angeles for the past 5 years. Within each track there is a mixture of Epiic dance and spoken word, accompanied by original orchestral progressions, cinematic scores, and soundscapes composed by Friidom. Not only is it a piece of artistic and exquisite dance improvisation, it also portrays an exploration of self through dance.

“If you have contemporary or modern or Krump, or whatever, you pay homage to the artists who created it by doing it, by being a part of their culture…”

We live in a simulated world. A world where it is less common to free ourselves by exploring movement in bodies. It is often forgotten how liberating and visually intriguing our natural movement can be.

As a project that Friidom has been teaching, performing, and recording for nearly half a decade, we wondered what prompted him to release EMM into the virtual world.

What motivated you to share your performances on Twitch and other media platforms?

“I had the idea, and wanted to release a dance version of a musician’s mixtape or single. I've always asked this question with a lot of dances. I grew up around it. Like, how does the dancer become just as big as an artist? I thought about that for a long time: What makes the musician different and will make them more popular? It is the fact that a music artist provides something that people can take home with them that they don't need the musician for.”

While, it may not have been the initial intention behind track one, as each piece develops, moving from track one to the next, in sequence, each dancer begins represents their own experiences, their own flavor, through these learned movements.

Is it strictly choreographed, or more freestyle improvisational dance?

“Everything is definitely freestyle base. So, the only choreography is structured to make sure the show goes accordingly, but 80% of the show is just freestyle. Even the words that they're speaking, sometimes there's audible, talking, etc. but it's really an improv based show. Imagine an improv show in real time. It's improvisational dance, improv acting, but with the Epiic structure to create a story.”

With each piece, we can see his growth and movement away from a focus on his own skill as a dancer and rather his representation of the movement he has created through others. Moving in sequence from track one to his recent release of track five, Friidom’s transformation from dancer and choreographer to creative director and mentor, is evident.

“You know, at first the first show is really just about me, but when you get to the second show to the third, the fourth, the fifth, literally the next show that I show is called the Dragonfly.”

The Epiic style of dance has the potential to be the next new wave dance movement. While Friidom sets the precedent structure for the style he has created and teaches, in the end, it is up to the dancer to create the final movement.

“There's a whole philosophy behind Epiic. And when I teach Epiic classes, I'm teaching people how to emote dance in a way it combines act in dance and also your life itself. A lot of times with dance, people don't portray who they really are.
Epiic is actually a style that helps bring out that aspect of what someone wants to be, larger than life, larger than they see themselves. Then there are hand movements, and if you watch the shows, you'll notice that a lot of the characters are doing different hand movements, different arm gestures that are very kin to the Epiic style of dance.
Just like when you have contemporary, everyone speaks the language of contemporary, just like with Epiic, everybody speaks the language of Epiic, but the style is based in you, in your craft”

Though there are many forms of dance, whether it be through a choreographed structure or through learned freestyle dance steps, it is less common to find a dance that originates from our own natural body movement.

“...within the dance style, what we want to try to do is make the dance as free as possible, but still there is a boundary, basic to human life and Epiic is that kind of understanding how your body moves naturally. It’s not how you have to break it to make the move, but just how you move in general. It's how you select the hand gestures that we do as humans that we don't really pay attention to, which is a part of Epiic…
I like to call it the last dance style because it really is just you. How do I make you dance as a human?
I'm taking people who've never acted before, but there's just some basic things...things I've learned in psychology and things to help people open their mind in order to feel the movement.”

Just as any dance style is set in motion by a creative source or individual, the movement evolves, the intention behind it may change and its original source is often forgotten. But it can be considered that this is not the goal of dancing. Though the historical recognition of a movement is salient, dancing can be used as a way to artistically express voice and emotions into something physically freeing, and visually representative of who we are as humans.

Check out new releases of the Epiic Movement Mixtape on Friidom’s Twitch Livestream: Friday’s at 7pm PT.