Choreographing: Seeing Your Piece Come to Life (Part 1)

For many people, when you watch a dance at a recital, dance competition, on tv, or at any other event it may seem like any other day for you. It may also seem like it's just another dance you were able to watch. In my last post, I talked a little bit about how dancers should practice and perform as if it's their last performance and how choreographers create each piece they do as if it's the last one they will ever present. However, I did not go into much detail about what it's like getting to the end of a new piece or when you finally see that piece come to life.

When it comes to teaching students you definitely want your kids to have the determination and ready-to-learn attitude, because without that your future piece will not come to its full maturity like you have envisioned it. During the time I have recently spent traveling and choreographing I have had the honor to work with people that have that determination and want to give you what you are seeing in your own mind. The process of creating a new piece for someone truly begins with deciding what is the story I want to tell and how can I portray that through my dancers and my choreography? For example, many of you may have already read a previous post of mine, Standing In the Rain. (If you have not, you definitely should!) In that post I discussed the dance Stand In the Rain started with the word PERSEVERANCE. Once it had been decided what this piece would be about, I was able to begin choosing a song and creating choreography.

After knowing the story, song, and choreography that would be used, then came the teaching and learning experience. I personally prefer to teach as much choreography as possible in one time period as long as the student can handle it. Basically, as long as they can continue learning more and working on it with the music once a new section has been, I will continue to add on. Once I have taught the entire dance I personally prefer to have my students sit down, close their eyes, listen to the dance and run the choreography in their mind. After that has been done, I have them sit, eyes closed, and only listen to the song. By "listen" I mean, truly listen to the lyrics or if there are no lyrics to listen to the way the instruments sound. During my years of training we did this in many dances, because in doing this you grasp a completely different side of the song and it helps to make your dance better because you dancer(s) now has more of an understanding of what the song fully sounds like.

Now onto the "cleaning process" during the cleaning process I begin breaking the dance down as small as I can. Basically, what I like to do is look at each part of the body individually throughout the dance and fix one thing at a time so that my dancer knows what to begin working on. Not only has this made it easier for them to remember, it has made it easier on my part as well because I am able to look at one thing only rather than everything at one time. After I've cleaned and sharpened their dance we continue to run the number until the day their performance arrives. Stay tuned for my next post Choreographing: Seeing Your Piece Come to Life (Part 2) where I will discuss what it's like to visually see your piece come to life in a performance!