Wiggles’ Beginners Guide to Wotagei

Wotagei (or more specifically cyalume dance) is a dance which is performed at night which uses glow sticks to form streaks of lights. Before continuing with the guide, acquaint yourself with the terms below. They will be used frequently throughout the guide.

Definitions

Here are a couple of commonly used terms in wotagei.

• Cyalume: A brand name used to refer to glow sticks in Japan.
• Wotagei (ヲタ芸): Also known as cyalume dance, is a dance performed with cyalumes.
• Waza (技): A single move in wotagei.
• Sabi (サビ): Japanese term for chorus or high point in a song.
• Sabi Waza (サビ技): Wazas that are used during the hight point of a song. Generally 32 beats long and make up most of what is to be learned in wotagei.
• Uchi Shi (打ち師): Japanese term for someone who practices and performs wotagei.

Learning Wotagei

These are a couple of important notes that must be kept in mind when learning wotagei.

• Focus on correctness of waza before speed. Speed is a just a matter of how fluid you are with the waza; this comes with practice. If a waza is executed incorrectly it will look bad.
• Don’t get discouraged if you can’t learn a waza immediately. When starting, a waza take some time for your body to memorize the movements.
• Always stretch! Wotagei is intensive on both your back, shoulders and legs. When you start you will be sore, but this can be minimized with proper stretching and warm up.
• Cyalumes are not needed to learn wotagei. Cyalumes are only really used during performance. During practice people use dead glow sticks or just their hands.