Choreography 101

Here it is, pretty simple really: VARIETY. And yet it’s amazing how many people don’t follow this really basic rule of choreography (or writing if you’re writing, or acting a play, or playing music, etc, etc, etc). Simply one of the first things you should do is show a lot of variety.

If you’re doing a formation routine don’t just show me everyone all moving in the same layout across the floor back and forth. You bore me! Show different shapes on the floor, show me lines of people, show me circles, show me intersecting lines, be a sculptor of people on the floor. Make the shapes created in different ways: people all get there at once, people get there one by one, or they come together from two different groups. Be creative about it, have fun with it!

Your audience will create story

It doesn’t have to be all that thought out, it doesn’t have to be smart. It just needs to show variety. Humans have a natural tendency to seek out meaning and will create story in their own minds to try to match whatever you do, even when you’re not even trying to show a story. Sometimes it’s better just to have a random sequence of a whole bunch of different wild strange unrelated movement.

Be methodical

Lists are wonderful for this. You can find tons of lists of all sorts of aspects or parts of dancing. Use it. Be methodical about it. A list of all the ballroom dance positions? Fantastic, make a routine that shows all of them. (That’s a great exercise I had to do for a class once.) A list of the Laban dynamics (wringing, pressing, floating, gliding, slashing, thrusting, dabbing, flicking). Again, fantastic! Layer that on top of your routine of different dance positions. (Also a fantastic exercise I’ve had to do for coaches and I’ve used for training students).

Find lists. Make your own lists. Treasure them. Dance positions, dynamics, partner Interactions, shapes of the body, shapes of movement on the floor, shapes of groups, timings of groups, rhythmical patterns. Get a great book like “Modern Educational Dance” by Valorie-Preston Dunlop which has tons of great lists from Laban.

Great creativity can come from just being methodical.

Show people everything you know

Know all the steps in the syllabus? Great, show me. Know the Laban dynamics, great, show me. Know different types of rumba walks, great, show me. Know different types of turns. Show me ALL of them. Know some acting? Awesome, show me different emotions. Layer as many things as you can on what you do. Make your dancing RICH. Show me all that you’ve learned and all the effort you’ve put into learning dance. Make it look like it costs a million dollars.

Don’t be afraid to incorporate other things you’ve learned. You know modern dance, ballet, african, acting, yoga, pilates, music, whatever. Incorporate the variety you have learned from those into your dancing. Create your own style that is uniquely you.

Refine style later

Start with the variety. If in the end your purpose is to create a certain mood then cut and trim and manipulate after you have the base variety. To create or show a certain mood, to truly show it, you must show the opposite. You can’t show speed without slow – otherwise it is just frantic. You can’t show happiness or sadness without it’s opposite.

This is fundamental to all art

Writing. What kinds of sentences are there? Passive, Active, Interrogative, Imperative, etc. Show them all to me. What types of phrases are there? What kinds of constructs are there? Show them all to me.

Acting. What kinds of feelings are there? What are different reactions to them? What are physical actions that people do?