An expostion on rails

(I previously wrote this, and it contains some of my meandering ideas of the conceptualization of rails within liquid. It's not exhaustive it's just some ideas.)

Rails are a type of mime. They give substance to the illusion. On the most basic level they are just simple lines you’re drawing in the space around your body. Without them you’re stuck doing like an energy ball thingy-majig in your stomach area with your elbows locked into your side. That being said a lot of people forget you can use this as a cool little illusion/ transition and totally blow it off as wack.


The handwave and it’s role

Two definitions I use are pulling and sitting in a rail. These will make more sense as I separate styles:

Pulling through a rail - The handwave is almost nonexistent. You’re literally pulling your hands through space one after another and it creates the illusion.

Sitting in a rail - The handwave is the main attraction here. You aren’t pulling through space to create the illusion, the handwave is creating the illusion.


Most styles of liquid are defined by their rails. Except for figure 8 liquid which is defined by a split although figure 8 liquid can be a type of hyper-rail. Figure 8 liquid gives depth in a lot of the same ways as orbital liquid.


Orbital liquid - 3-D. The pathways you are shaping are circular and you are mostly contouring your arms as well. The way this looks best is when you pull your rails. Circular pulled rails are illusional and give incredible weight and dimension to your dance. In fact anything circular gives your dance a lot of weight when done correctly. See boogaloo. A huge mistake I see people make is when they try to sit in a circular contouring rail. It’s impossible. I’ve never seen it look good. Most people are thinking handwave-handwave-handwave then try and add weight to their dance by doing a circular contouring rail but they don’t understand that the handwave isn’t important.

Linear liquid - 2-D. These rails are geometric usually just a straight line. The most prominent example would be the box rail. You can pull through these rails and actually pulling through a linear rail is a great way to transition into orbital liquid or out of orbital liquid. But linear liquid is the type of liquid to really sit in your rails. You want to draw the lines out as cleanly as possible and not rush your handwave. Folds also come into play if you are capable of utilizing wrist rotations while doing rails. In fact wrist rotations add so much more to what you can accomplish it’s a shame hardly anyone uses them. You can do circular rails also but it’s not the same type of circle as you do in orbital. The circle you would do here is flat and 2-d. It’s important to realize the difference. Most people train their handwave for linear liquid without realizing it, then try and do orbital. This is why so many liquid dancer’s illusions are trash. They don’t realize there is a difference in mechanics. It’s like trying to shove a square into a circle.

Fixed point liquid. A natural compliment to linear liquid. Instead of both hands miming the area of a line one remains at a fixed point while the other contours the space. So for instance you have a straight line you’re going to run your liquid over.

A--------B

You start with both hands at point A. One hand moves with or without a wave to point B then stops at point B it then becomes the fixed point. The other hand may then follow the same path to point B. Of course you can establish more complex rails then this. For instance the initial fixed point doesn’t have to follow the same path as the lead hand. Nor does is it have to meet or stop at the second fixed point. But be careful doing this as you can lose your viewer and things can start looking like garbage. Also this style has the most potential to be mixed with animation b/c of it’s nature of relying on stillness and non-movement.

As a sidenote it’s always good to try and juice up your rails by adding texture through tension, speed control, ticking, or vibration. Basically all of these effects are created by muscle control in your arms.

A split may break a rail physically in the viewers eye. But that doesn’t mean that a rail connection still isn’t there. One hand following the other is a logical connection. All the rails I described previously are logical connections. So on the other hand if your walking normally there is an illogical connection between your hands. It is your job to balance logical and illogical connections. To make illogical connections logical when doing splits.

But like I was saying just because you split doesn’t mean your rail is finished there is always a hidden connection for you to find. Orbital liquid can spontaneously form what I call hyper-rails that don’t physically exist but visually exist. This is mainly done by pulling your orbits at a certain speed than doing a split. You sometimes leave behind visual tracers. When you hit splits while pulling your liquid sometimes you leave ghost trails that are connects to what you are doing... hyper-rails. This happens mostly with orbital liquid and figure eights I’ve found. Linear liquid has a different dynamic completely since it relies on a different more isolated handwave to look good.