The anatomy of a Mock Rock routine

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The anatomy of a Mock Rock routine
Team DOB’s routine included a fight with a “robot.”
Andrew Dixon | Collegian

For the audience, Mock Rock is a treat. It’s an hour of high adrenaline flips, tumbles, and aerials all provided free of charge. But what does it take behind the scenes to choreograph such daring stunts? What makes a winning Mock Rock routine? 

Step one: plan in advance. Far in advance. 

“If we go from the start date from when I was first putting things together, it was immediately after homecoming of fall 2019,” said senior Caleb Lambrecht, who choreographed Simpson’s winning Mock Rock routine this year. “I got a lot of inspiration from different videos from professional dance routines and from random videos of popular high school dance routines online.” 

Whitley resident assistant sophomore Carter Floering also began choreographing WhitWatWay’s second place dance months in advance of the competition, completing the routine’s basic outline in his dorm. His main inspirations: past Mock Rocks and “too much k-pop”. 

“I’m also a big fan of ‘America’s Got Talent’ and of all of their light acts“which is why we had the clicking lights on our hands for the futuristic theme,” Floering said. 

Not all teams had the luxury of prolonged preparation. 

Crowd favorite Team DOB, which is composed primarily of the ultimate frisbee team, formed a month before homecoming and the group’s titular leader, Robert “DOB” Kintz, only choreographed the routine two and half weeks before the competition. 

“My original idea was to start a team DOB, except it would be only me,” said Kintz. “Then at a bowling night, my friend Logan mentioned it and there was a lot of interest in it. I said, ‘This is a funny idea,’ and we kinda just put it together.”

Like Lambrecht and Floering, Kintz relied heavily on videos he found on the internet for inspiration, especially for the climatic robot fight. 

For our ‘Megolavania’ routine, I looked up videos combining taekwondo and dance movements and took what I thought would be easiest to teach in a short amount of time,” Kintz said. 

Once all the relevant YouTube videos have been culled through, step two begins: choosing the music. 

Music is the determining factor in a routine’s structure. While a team needs to have a lot of dances picked out ahead of time according to Lambrecht, it’s almost impossible to figure out where those dances will go without figuring out what the mix will be first. 

For some teams, picking music is an exact science.  

“I talked a lot with Avery Helms who had done our Mock Rock last year,” said Floering. “He has a whole ranking system for songs based on whether they are too slow or too fast to dance too.”

Songs are ranked on a tier from F to S that also takes into account lyrics. For example, Floering said that “Cake by the Ocean” by DNCE would be an A for danceability, but it’s vulgar language drops it down to D tier.

Despite entering the Mock Rock game later than their competitors, Team DOB decided to add their own musical creation to their routine for comedic effect. 

“For part of the music we had me playing the violin, DOB playing the obo, and Sebastian playing the trumpet — all as badly as we could of course,” said Team DOB member junior Allie Spaccarelli. 

After choreography is planned and music is picked, the teams are finally able to begin step three: practice. 

“We started practicing two weeks before the event every night,” said Floering. “As things got closer, we added two hours practices. It really came down to the last day. We started practicing at 11, took a lunch break, and then ran it again with props until 2:30. We met again at 5:30 and ran through it a final time.”

While Simpson’s practice schedule was similar to WitWatWay’s, Team DOB once again broke with convention when rehearsing for Mock Rock. Kintz said the team practiced two hours a night two weeks before the competition and only one hour a night the week of. 

According to Lambrecht, homecoming week practices are emotionally and physically taxing on the whole team. 

“There’s always that point in homecoming week where practices start to get stressful and tension rises, but as long as you have guys who are willing to push through that you will be fine,” Labrecht said. “One night all the basketball courts were taken up and we literally had nowhere to go, so we parked our car at Simpson field, put on our headlines, and practiced. It was freezing with the wind chill, but we had them doing routine to make sure the dance routine looked good.” 

While each routine was planned in advance, all the choreographers agreed that practices provided opportunity for dances to grow and evolve. 

“The dance changed a lot,” said Foerling. “I planned on 15 people participating, but we had 25 people, so we had to change some of the formations. Every now and then in practices people would have cool ideas like aerials which we would add in here and there.” 

One of the most memorable parts of Simpson’s Mock Rock — the Irish Step Dancing interlude — wasn’t even included in Lambrecht’s original vision. 

“There was a junior Kappa, Vera Mackyntoich, who had taught a couple of our guys some Irish dancing, and they got so attached that they wanted to include it in the dance,” said Lambretch. “We only threw in Ben Hinrichs and the kilt earlier during homecoming week because we had seen him dancing around the dorm and knew that we had to include him.” 

Occasionally, inspiration will even strike during a performance. 

“Drinking the chocolate milk in the middle of the dance was planned, but at the end when I finished the rest, that was not,” said Kintz. “I saw that there was still half of a half gallon left and I just went for it.” 

After two weeks of intense practices, the winning teams delivered entertaining performances each with a defining moment that earned them their victory: a rotating tower of men, a Daft Punk DJing jam, and a robot dance battle. 

“The biggest priority is it being fun and making something people can really get into,” said Floering. “Couple that with a dedicated team and you have a winning Mock Rock routine.”