As promised, I choreographed my piece during the 3 week summer intensive! I am currently in Europe with my family and will be back in the U.S. next week. While I am happy with what I finished during the intensive, I think I will spend one more week tweaking and cleaning parts of it and filming a video when I get back. I would like to use this post to reflect on my time spent choreographing and explain parts of the process. In one of the books I read for my research, “The Art of Making Dances”, Doris Humphrey lists the steps one should take when choreographing.
The first step was, of course, finding inspiration, or something to dance about. For me, this was shadowing the medical professionals and discovering a connection between each field. As you all know by now, this is contrasting the strengths and weaknesses of the body.
The next step was to find music. While Humphrey emphasizes that you don't necessarily need music to dance, I personally find that I can derive movement from music with much more ease. In another book I read about ballet (101 Stories of the Great Ballets), George Balanchine, one of the most famous choreographers, often told his dancers that the audience needs to be able to “see the music, hear the dance.” I wanted to find a song that had contrast so that the different “parts” could represent either strength or weakness. I found this in the song “Tango - Por Una Cabeza” by Carlos Gardel. This song has soft, classical aspects and intense, tango aspects: when the music is classical, the movement will portray the weakness of the body, while strength will be shown in the tango sections. While I loved the song the minute I heard it, I had some misgivings about choosing it due to its length of almost 4 minutes. Since this is my first time choreographing, I didn't know how much I would be able to accomplish. Also, dancing full out for 4 minutes is exhausting! I wondered if I could just use one section of it, but I love the whole song so much that I chose to do the whole thing and simply spend more time choreographing.
The third part, the most difficult in my opinion, was to actually choreograph. I knew it would be difficult to do after long, tiring days of the intensive, but I don't have enough time anywhere else in my summer. In addition to being exhausted while choreographing, I was also injured. In April, I was the lead in Ballet Memphis Junior Company’s spring show and sprained my ankle the night of our opening performance (and continued to dance on it for the rest of the performances, making it much worse). I had thought it was mostly healed by the time the intensive started, so I came back a bit gung ho and did too much too soon. For the first week I danced more than my ankle could handle, so it made the rest of the intensive harder and I had to do flat instead of pointe for much of it. As I intended my piece to be on pointe, it was difficult trying to choreograph on flat for what was meant to be done on pointe. Another issue was having studio space: Ballet Memphis has three beautiful studios (though we are moving to a different location next year), and the younger girls had class in the larger two when I was choreographing. Since I choreographed in a smaller space, I am worried my piece will not “fill up” the space of a larger studio or stage if I ever needed to perform or use it in an audition. Hopefully I can use the “transitional” parts (like the running or large jumps) to take up more space if needed. Another issue was actually having a studio available. Sometimes there would be a private class in the studio when I wanted to choreograph, so I would have to go home. In hindsight, this was quite a blessing because it gave my body and mind time to rest and take a step away from it to get a better grasp of the piece as a whole. However, I lost some valuable time and will need to make it up when I get back.
I really enjoyed choreographing and even began to understand my “thesis” of strengths and weaknesses better: it is much easier to draw inspiration for movements portraying weakness when your body is tired! Similarly, as I grew stronger from the intensity of the classes, I knew more about the strengths in my body. I can't wait to get back and finish it up!
