I love- I want- my parapara!
I wanna dance my music now!
You teach me- I learn it- I'm happy again
When I can raise my hands
-lyrics from kill the silence by domino
i wanna talk about one of my oldest special interests-
para para!
you in? ok
para para are choreographed japanese dances to eurobeat music that basically only use your arms.
i’m not going to say much about what eurobeat is here, it’s too much of a separate rabbit hole. for now all i’ll say is, there are only a couple labels that make it, it is basically Fast Italo Disco, and japan is the only place that ever wanted it, lol.
parapara may have started back in the 1980s! isn’t that nuts. but there’s little documentation of it. no one even seems sure where it came from. most of the documentation of parapara is in traded & sold tapes of routines, which is how they spread.
one of the oldest parapara tapes is Venus Cafe Wanganou Special. i… think this is a clip of it. if it is, i’m crying bc it’s literally just A Guy In His Bedroom. i will guess at a date- 1990-1993. Please Enjoy This Man
dances are still fairly slow and there’s no chorus choreography besides “step touch and clap.” but at the same time, it feels basically fully formed. these exact moves will be around for the dances whole life.
1994 is momentous bc we get the first official dance tape from one of the eurobeat-producing labels, Avex Trax. the tape is Para Para Kyouten 0 (and it Slaps)
the whole tape is on youtube in better quality, but here’s a clip in horrible quality so i don’t link you to an hour long video. this song is from 1992. (why not find a better quality clip of a different song? because i love this dance and i want you to look at it. that is all)
dance speed is increasing. but most of the verse choreo on this tape is still just “step touch and clap.” and so is some of the verse here.
interestingly, at this time i believe the dance was mostly associated with like, businessmen in high-class clubs, as can be seen by the attire of the dancers in the instructional videos from this time.
parapara continued quietly. a few more parapara kyouten tapes came out. but the massive explosion happened in ~1999. this is when it became a real japanese cultural phenomenon (some would say fad lol), showing up on tv and stuff. there was even a mickey mouse parapara made and performed at tokyo disney sea. this is some cursed footage
the explosion was fueled by parapara escaping the high-class clubs and becoming associated with the gyaru/gal subculture. there are so many tapes and routines from this time, but the most famous probably came from Parapara Allstars, this incredibly gyaru-looking dance group. (if one of their members looks familiar, it's because she was also in the para para kyouten tapes!) this is a clip from their first tape.
(digression- these videos were also filmed in Velfarre, a club in tokyo that was at the time very famous for parapara and is referenced in some eurobeat songs of the time.)
this is when we finally get verse choreography like on every song! also, some of the dances are starting to get quite fast. a unique feature of dances that popped up around this time is a very specific end chorus “pose.” the second song in the last clip had one. so does this one
also, around this time an arcade & ps2 game called parapara paradise came out. it had vague clunky motion sensors for your arms, you had to buy a special sensor bar for the ps2 version. the background videos for this were made by the parapara allstars, and around when i was first getting into para para, these background videos ripped from the ps2 disc were all over youtube. (they were also filmed in velfarre)
the huge boom died out pretty fast, as soon as 2001 according to wikipedia (very reliable source), but parapara videos and stuff kept being made for years after that. the final parapara allstars video, number 7, was made in 2002 i think. however, the gyaru subculture in particular really held on to their parapara. this is a video of models from a gyaru fashion magazine doing a parapara to a eurobeat mix of an anime op song from 2005, so the video is also probably from around 2005.
however, even the gyaru couldn’t keep this version of parapara on life support forever.
the final evolution of parapara, its last gasp, was techpara. techpara uses more techno-sounding music instead of eurobeat, has a distinctive wide stance, and has super fast arm movement. however, the same basic moves are still in there. here's an example.
i don’t think techpara was ever that popular?? which is a shame because i think it’s v cool. but there were some instructional videos sold about it regardless. this was around 2005-2008.
there’s also trapara… please don’t ask me what the difference between trapara and techpara is because i still do not know. it’s the same time period. maybe it’s a little less mutated than techpara is and more like the routines of the boom? but it still has the wide stance and faster movements. i don’t know man, anyway here’s a routine to everytime we touch. yes, that song.
and yeah, that’s it… parapara basically died after this. rip
i got into parapara in like 2008 and it already felt like stumbling into a fad graveyard. there were some scattered clips around, largely from the ps2 game, but very little info.
weirdly, rather than reupload their old dance videos from parapara allstars and stuff, avex officially licensed these new ones with this pink background? i seem to recall that when i first got into parapara everything else was often DMCAd by the eurobeat labels and these were like all that stayed up.
as you may have noticed, avex has FINALLY officially uploaded some of their old tapes in good quality, inspired by lockdown. they’re titled Stay Home & Para Para. i’ve linked several of them here. i'm v grateful to have them.
however, parapara is still basically deader than dead. i can’t even find people doing paraparas on tiktok. tiktok!!!! it was made for dancing!!! if it was anywhere it’d be there.
if you want a gauge of how dead the movement is, there isn’t even anything on deltadance.com!
when it was originally made it was a eurobeat label website, which is why it was referenced in the aforelinked song. the absolute hubris of making a song about your website if you're not committed to keeping it online forever
anyway, that's all, thanks for reading <3 btw, yes, i do know way too many of these dances.
