the creative journey: choreography edition
This past weekend, I taught maybe one of my favorite pieces of choreography that I've made (to 6:45 by Naïka). The class was already special - it was my first class back after a very long break - but I didn't realize how much I would love the choreography until my final test run about an hour before class. Usually it takes me a little longer to appreciate my work, but I walked into class with my heart deeply entwined with the piece. I always want to feel this way about work I've made, so let's deconstruct some of the ways my creative process was different this time!
1. Let the backdrop of the piece simmer in my brain.
I first started listening to this song almost six months ago, and I've been a fan of Naïka's music since 2021. As my brother can attest, I have a tendency to listen to music on repeat, so my brain has gotten acquainted with this song and musical style over many hours. Of course, familiarity is important, but I'm learning that an hour of creative work can be better spread out over a week than continuously.
In the past, I've worked on pieces in long stretches, carving out 3-4 hours to complete my choreography. This time, I listened to the song on repeat on my walk to and from the office and built up the choreography piece by piece, four-count by four-count.
Every day, I would go through the movement I had already devised and just try to add a few counts, even if they weren't even connected to the phrase I had already choreographed. The incremental nature helped remove the pressure of needing to finish the piece and open my creativity to experimenting. If I only needed to add a few movements, it wasn't that big of a deal to scrap everything I did that day and try again the next day.
This almost disjoint way of working let me start in the middle of the piece (the chorus of the song) and jump around to different phrases or musical cues that really spoke to me. Since I had become intimately familiar with the song over many months of listening to it, I didn't have to worry about a cohesive through-line through the choreography. My body had already processed the music and internalized the feeling it evoked.
I ended up starting at the chorus, then moving to the beginning of the piece, then filling in the remaining gaps. Choreographing transitions isn't too scary.
2. Just walk!
Several years ago, I read Move by Caroline Williams. She writes, generally, on the impact of movement on our brains and, specifically, on the impact of walking on creativity, positing that walking relays back to our brain a figurative sense of progress.
I have found walking to be one of the single most impactful cheat codes for creativity. Many of my best ideas in all areas of life have come to me on a good walk, but I never seriously tried using a walk as time to choreograph, probably because doing any of the footwork breaks my walking flow and ability to get where I need to go. To get around this, I started with using my walks just to choreograph my upper body (and imagine, but not rehearse how that connected to my lower half), but I eventually just realized I could take a break in my walk to practice an 8 count and then keep the walk going.
By choreographing while walking, I found my body naturally open to new pathways of movement. Sometimes, when I choreograph at home, there's a cold start problem when I'm presented with a new phrase in the music. I'll fixate on one phrase or one lyric and try many things, but often from a place of movement stasis. While walking, I found that, even if I was focused on finding the right movement for a specific lyric, I was always starting from something (a walk), so it was easier to come up with different choreography options.
Choreography and creativity always comes with experimentation scraps - a move you try that doesn't bridge into the next move cleanly, a paragraph that doesn't progress the plot or understanding of the characters, material that just doesn't work. Most choreographers I know will improvise and immediately forget everything they just did. I have so often created a phrase that I love, only to have no idea what I did five seconds ago. Unlike writing or painting or other mediums, there's no record of the experimentation (unless you record the whole session, but I don't know anyone who does that) since your body is the canvas. I found that choreographing while walking increased the amount of scraps I had, especially since I had no idea how the movement looked and only how it felt, so I would go home, try it out, and realize that the movement might feel good but didn't actually convey what I wanted it to.
Along with the more incremental nature of building the choreography in pieces, there were so many iterations of what the piece looked like on the way to what I ultimately ended up teaching, but that just made me love it all the more.
3. Figure out when to break from the narrative.
Growing up, I never listened to lyrics, and it wasn't until college that I memorized all of the lyrics to a song (which song that was is under a strict NTK). College was also when I first started choreographing, and it's been a continual learning process and readjustment to learn when movement needs to directly play into the message or narrative of the piece and when it can just be movement.
Much of my choreography has been very dance and dancer driven - what movement feels good? what movement patterns are in my vocabulary? what movement is simply visually interesting? I think there's so much value in including movement for movement's sake, especially if it serves the dancers in feeling confident or, quite honestly, having a section that allows them to be smaller and preserve their energy for other parts of the choreography.
As I have become more attuned to lyrics and more intentional about telling stories through my work, I have found that my creativity and my range of expression has broadened. In this piece, I was very intentional to include both lyrically- and sonically-driven movement. Though I didn't choreograph it straight from the start to the end, I made sure to include pockets throughout the piece to grow bigger - and pockets where dancers could rest and take a beat. In class, I offered a range of choices in making a movement expansive, and it was so gratifying to see the breadth of choices students took - and where they might have fully expanded one movement, they kept another simple.
Fin
As I wrote this, I marveled at the ways that these lessons had already latently emerged in my other creative pursuits. I am also working on draft two of my novel, and, though I hadn't thought deeply about my writing creative process, everything here that applies to choreography also applies to writing. Here's to more dancing, more writing, more art that nourishes the soul and expands the mind. :)