Corey Defeo a.k.a Ice Kream Teddy- Will Light Up Your World

By: Diana Rodriguez | Instagram & Twitter: @dancindiana_19

In 2006, the electronic music scene gave birth to a dance form called gloving: a mind blowing art from that uses multicolored LED fingertip gloves to bring complex arm and finger movements to life. Two years later, Corey Defeo, a.k.a Ice Kream Teddy, decided to buy his first pair of light up gloves at an electronic festival called Oogie Boogie. His curiosity to try the dance form came from simply wanting to do something else besides listen to music and talk to people at events. Once he put on the white gloves, he instantly got hooked to the dance form, and has poured his heart and soul into growing and innovating gloving.

Teddy is one of the few original glovers that has been consistently gloving over the past six years. The empowerment Teddy gets from the audience is what drives to him to continually refine his technical, yet animated gloving style. He tries to add as much animation as possible to his small technical movements to captivate his audience. He loves being able to make someone lose themselves in the manipulation of the lights, creating what he likes to call “the trance.” All Teddy needs is a dark room and some music to send the person into a luminous world of colors, and before you know it, you will be right there in his trance.

“It’s an indescribable feeling,” Teddy said. “The only thing I could really equate it to is feeling empowered. When someone is literally marveling over everything you are doing, it empowers you,” said Teddy. Teddy’s process towards innovation is unique and mind boggling. He tries to have his head and hands in a diagonal angle from each other as much as possible to give him a 3D, Tetris-like view. He says it allows him to create new patterns and combinations in his gloving.

Teddy’s strong passion towards the artistic innovation of gloving has made him into the most decorated competitor in the gloving community. He has won over four BOSS competitions, and recently won the Legends Tournament at the 4th annual International Gloving Championship (IGC), a full-day event where glovers show off their skills and compete against the best glovers in the world.

“IGC has given glovers a home where they can share their ideas, mingle, and bond,” said Teddy. He believes IGC is the main contributor to the expansion of the gloving community (which has gone from 1,000 to roughly 60,000 globally). Teddy even has become a head judge and coordinator for IGC, a dream job he says he is blessed to have.

Check this past year promo video for the 2014 International Gloving Competition:

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