Confessions of a (Novice) Choreographer
My love of dance has always been rooted in the act of dancing itself...actually physically moving my body through space, contorting it into sequences of what are hopefully somewhat aesthetically-pleasing shapes. The incredible mental focus and clarity that comes from dancing, where everything else in my life falls away, and it is just about the next movement, the next rhythmic touchpoint in the music. That will always be at the root of what drives my love of dance; however, I've been reflecting of late on the evolution of that love to include something I hadn't expected: creating my own choreography.
For over 30 years, my relationship to dance choreography has always been as a vessel for someone else's choreography. Even when I was involved with Glenwood Dance Studio (a non-profit dance studio in Chicago, which I helped to co-found back in 2013), I never forayed into choreographing--always left it to our professional dance teachers or those who seemed to have a natural aptitude for it. I confined myself to teaching "combinations"--these are sequences of movements that are often taught in classes to help dance students practice a particular skill or movement type.
However, after moving to Toronto, I joined PushPULL Dance in 2017, an amateur dance company comprised of "dancing professionals, not professional dancers". There, I discovered that the company members choreographed for each other. And so after my first year with the company, I challenged myself to try my hand at choreographing my own dance piece.
City of New Beginnings (2019)
Each year, PushPULL Dance's performance has a theme, and in that season, it was "Pivotal Moments". I thought about the pivotal moment of my moving to a new city (Toronto) and having to find my way on my own for the first time. The challenge then was figuring out how that would actually translate into dance. What was a lovely revelation for me in that process was discovering how dance choreography is truly a beautiful and unique medium of storytelling. A dance can tell a story with a clear narrative arc or just simply convey an emotional state. It's more abstract than written or oral storytelling, but in many ways, the form necessitates that one reduce the story to its essence--its fundamental components. Which I would argue makes it all the more powerful.
Photo credit: SVPhotography.ca
The narrative I landed on for the piece was of the initial sense of isolation and loneliness in a new city--of being out of sync with the rhythm of the city (as depicted by the dancers in grey). But that even just meeting one person can help pull you out of that isolation, helping you find your place in the city and opening up new possibilities.
Photo credit: SVPhotography.ca
As this was my first time choreographing, I was probably a bit overly ambitious in terms of wanting to include somewhat elaborate formations and multiple different pieces of choreography happening simultaneously. I also found that choreographing dance did not come naturally for me. I spent hours labouring over a few musical phrases at a time, trying to figure out what the ideal movements would be and how they best connected with each other. I approached tackling choreography the only way I knew how...breaking down the music count by count and laying them all out over multiple Excel spreadsheets. Unsurprisingly, I was likely overthinking it at all.
Photo credit: SVPhotography.ca
But it was also a period of figuring out my dance style. As a dancer, I've always gravitated towards fluid, lyrical, balletic movements. But perhaps because I desired to try to go against type (and also because it seemed to align best with the musical style), a lot of the movement in this piece is quite sharp, angular, and staccato in nature. It felt appropriate in conveying the sense of a city to have that kind of rigidity.
In looking back, I am definitely proud of my inaugural piece (and of course, all of the lovely dancers who brought it to life). But for taking some choreographic risks and pushing myself beyond my comfort zone.
Telephone (2021)
The COVID-19 pandemic, as you'd expect, threw everything for a loop. The next piece I had been working on in 2020 (which was actually finished) had to be shelved due to lockdown, and everything migrated to virtual. They say necessity is the mother of invention...with our entire season being virtual, we were forced to get creative in how we'd put together "a show". What we ended up landing on was releasing a series of dance films, where dancers would film themselves (or eventually be filmed in small groups outdoors), and we would edit together a final product.
The theme of the season was "Connectivity". This sparked the idea, taking me back to my academic days as a linguist, of depicting the challenges of communication. How difficult it can be to really understand what another person is saying, be it because they may speak differently than we do (due to a foreign accent, for instance) or because so often we just talk past one another. And that true connection springs from that moment of realization, where we finally understand each other.
With that in mind, the seed of the piece grew from the idea of using the "Telephone game" as a way to convey that sense of broken communication. What was particularly fun was figuring out how to actually do a visual "Telephone game". What I landed on was choreographing and filming myself performing a relatively short dance phrase (~15 seconds) and then sending it to two dancers, with the instructions that they could only watch my video twice before filming themselves doing it. Their videos were then sent to 4 other dancers, with the same instructions, and so forth. As the videos came in, it was fascinating to see the "degradation" of the original dance phrase--the visual equivalent of whispering "I read a lot of John Locke" into someone's ear and, by the 10th person, getting "Dogs are best when wearing socks".
I also enjoyed being able to flex my video editing muscles again, a throwback to my younger days editing such hits as X-Files clip videos and a high school English class soap opera (analogue, no less). In editing, I opted to use a black and white comic book filter for the initial portion of the piece, as another way of visually-depicting a kind of incomplete communication signal. The filtered image is necessarily lacking information--colour, texture, and other details. The moment of comprehension was then depicted as a transition from this into full colour, where all the nuance and detail of the "message" can be seen and understood.
In the end, I was pleased with how my first attempt at a choreographed dance film turned out--given all the challenges and constraints we faced (e.g., teaching it all over Zoom, self-filming, etc.). But choreographing for video, at least in this context, actually came with some interesting benefits, including not having to worry about formations and how all the dancers move in relation to one another. Made choreographing much faster and simpler!
Explore (2022)
My next choreographic effort was a dance film called "Explore". The premise of the piece was that we so often move through our own city, the daily grind of our commute, on our phone or just oblivious to what's around us. And that there is a simple pleasure in taking a moment to look up and see all the beauty and colour of where we live. This was inspired by the pandemic travel restrictions forcing people to stay in their city and explore their own neighbourhoods, and how much can actually be found there.
Knowing that it was to be a video piece very much influenced how it was choreographed. I knew as an editor that I would not have any one dancer's video featured for long stretches of time, which meant that I could choreograph in shorter phrases and also build in points with no choreography to be supplemented by other shots. I was excited to be able to actually shoot the video myself, rather than rely on self-shot submissions, to be able to exercise more creative control over the visual composition. It was also a lot of fun to explore Toronto to find interesting establishing shots of the city and people moving through it--ultimately just reinforced the thesis of my piece!
I've noticed that my pieces tend to have a kind of two-act structure: an initial act, usually where there is a degree of emotional turmoil or angst, a revelatory turning point, and then a second act that is often more joyful. This piece fell into that structure: the initial daily grind, trudging through the city, then that moment where we finally look up and notice our city's beauty, and finally the sense of awe as we explore where we live. To visually reflect that journey, I put the first act in black and white, to underscore a kind of drabness and monotony, before transitioning into colour at that moment of realization.
Rehearsal of the piece, before it was formally shot
It was an interesting challenge, knowing that I would be shooting the piece on city streets, to choreograph something that would work for a long, narrow "stage". There were a lot of "dance-ified" walking movements to depict that sense of moving through a city. It's always difficult, particularly for video pieces, to imagine how it will ultimately be realized in its final format (see the rehearsal video vs. final video). So I suppose you just have to trust that the strange movements you come up with in your living room will make sense in context.
The development of this piece was an interesting one, as I was actually traveling the entire time, really taking "explore" to heart. I choreographed and rehearsed the entire piece in the living room of a cottage in Nova Scotia (likely much to the chagrin of my friend who I travelled with, who had to hear this song on repeat for weeks). I quite love that my time exploring Atlantic Canada for 5 weeks is somewhat embedded into the fabric of this choreography.
lovely (2022)
As we were finally able to at least entertain the possibility of a live performance post-lockdown, I was excited at the prospect of choreographing for the stage again. They say "write what you know", and so it is perhaps no surprise that my choreographic efforts have all been vaguely auto-biographical or a reflection of my current emotional state. This piece stemmed from my emotional tribulations over the course of the pandemic, specifically, being a single person living alone, without any real physical contact or connection for, basically, years. The theme of the show this year was "Simple Pleasures". It is perhaps the simplest of things I crave, though so often unattainable for me it seems--of just being in someone's physical presence. Being able to reach out and touch someone, be held by them.
Photo credit: SVPhotography.ca
As such, the narrative arc of the piece began with that feeling of sadness, loneliness, and frustration--the sense of just wandering alone, searching for connection. With the pivot point of the piece coming when we finally are able to find someone, even just to give us a hug, and being overwhelmed with relief. I don't know if it's the style of the music or the melancholic feel, but I did lean in to what I would consider my "natural" dance style, a more fluid and graceful aesthetic, that did make choreography come more intuitively for me.
Photo credit: SVPhotography.ca
I discovered that I do in fact have a tendency to choreograph multiple different but simultaneous choreographies. While visually interesting, it does make it more challenging to teach! Mercifully, I was able to teach the majority of this piece in-person, though we did have to suffer through a few virtual rehearsals in lockdown, which were essentially useless as so much of the piece involves contact partner work. I also learned about the perils of paired partner work, as I had one dancer who unfortunately had to step out due to injury about a month before the show. Fortunately, I had a "dance captain", who often serves as an understudy, who had to quickly get up to speed to be able to step in.
Photo credit: SVPhotography.ca
All in all, I was very happy with how my piece turned out. The dancers were able to pick it up and dance it cleanly quite early into the rehearsal process, making for a smoother lead up to the show. I felt confident in my choreography, in a way I hadn't yet felt in the last couple of years, perhaps finally feeling like I'd found my stride and my sense of style. But I rather imagine that even that will continue to evolve, as I sample new music and new dances. I'm looking forward to it.
Photo credit: SVPhotography.ca