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Day 11: Choreographing • 83 Choreography involves the why of a thing. In contemporary dance, you often have an idea, a question, something you want to investigate in more depth. It’s a form-giving process that draws on all your resources: engaging the flow, finding your fire, and opening to mystery. When complete, the whole is larger than the sum of its parts—it transcends itself. Like a hologram , any part is reflective of the whole. Choreographing creates a work that is generally repeatable, while requiring ongoing spontaneity of the performer(s). Awareness, specificity, and surprise apply to both set and improvised dances.1 Yet the experience of shifting to choreography from composing and improvising requires looking for clarifying patterns. The beginning is not necessarily the beginning. As you work, you are looking for the opening moments of the dance, waiting to discover a structure that will hold all the material that is being shaped. Once you find the beginning, everything rearranges. Then you can begin to extend the presence of place—the world the dance inhabits. There’s a sense of discovering the real, underlying intent somewhere in the process of making, and a sense of earning the ending.2 As in good writing, choreography must be extraordinarily specific in the closing moments. The weight of an arm, the timing of touch gets to ultimate clarity. Ambivalence or avoidance has no place in this phase of the choreographic process; concept moves to completion based on some sort of inner knowing. In the opening moments of performance, the choreographer is the guide; by the end, the choreographer has disappeared, and the viewer inhabits the dancing world through the performers. Choreographers create their own systems; there is no preknown script. The process spans time, engaging memory and imagination. Framing, shaping, and finding the arc of the piece from initial impulse to the completed dance requires tenacity—a kind of courage. Form and content are reciprocal. Communicating complex ideas in a complicated world involves decision making. Every choice closes one pathway, focuses another. Translated through the medium of the body moving in space, the choreographic process makes the invisible visible. Identifying your impulses and images is like tracking a wild animal. It is a process of following. You may think you’re in charge, and some part of you is alert to form giving, but another part is groping and stumbling in the dark. And when you get close to the essence, your job, as maker, is to protect the wildness, keep it alive and well. You don’t teach or learn choreography ; you participate as it unfolds. Choreographing involves being inside the sensation, and also outside Choreographing Good choreography poses and answers its own questions. —Dr. John M. Wilson, choreography class Day 11 Finding the Edge Renée Redding-Jones had performed with Ron K. Brown and other choreographers. Yet when she created a work for our student company, she had never choreographed a major piece. It’s challenging for a well-known dancer to start something new. She describes how she called Ron every night, requesting advice and reporting progress. He asked, “Have you made anything fierce yet? You need something fierce.” She added a section in which eight dancers fall simultaneously, facedown, from standing. This one action shifted the range of the work, which was then chosen for the gala concert at the American Dance Festival. I think of Ron’s words when I’m making something new: “Is there anything fierce?” 84 • making as the shaper of sensation. Move—don’t just think or talk grand ideas. If a dance can be articulated in words, why create through movement? You’re looking for something other, more. Embody your ideas by translating impulse through physicality. Movement changes you as you change it. Use your resources: explore the forcefulness of rhythm, texture, and pacing. Gesture is instinctive, deeply sourced in your life history, and highly specific . The body knows what you want to say, if you listen to its cues. It’s easy to get sidetracked, drawn off course, and to lose the impulse you’re following. Others’ views and desires or your own distractions and insecurities can interrupt the process. So can overdrive and exhaustion, or overintellectualization. Too much verbal articulation in rehearsals, feedback sessions, and publicity deadens spontaneity. Sometimes silence is best—practicing containment of the energy required in making. You need a clear intent: to bring the whole through a form-giving process so you can share...

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