The Casual Dance Teacher's Podcast

Welcome to the Casual Dance Teacher's Podcast. I'm your host, Maia. No matter who, what, or when you teach, I'm here to share all my best tips and tools along with real and practical conversations with fellow dance educators to help you be the very best dance teacher you can be.

Let's talk about it. Hey there, friends. Thanks for coming back for week two of Choreography Month.

If you missed last week's episode, no worries. You can always go back and listen to it, but I'll catch you up to speed just in case you are joining us and did not get the message that this season, Choreography Month is all about throwing out lots of little examples and ideas of ways that might inspire you if you are stuck and just having trouble coming up with fresh choreography or have started working on choreography and are just stuck on one section. So in today's episode, I'm just going to be throwing out a lot of different examples of how you can use movement that you already have.

So let's say you started choreographing and you like what you have, but you're not sure how to move forward in the dance, or maybe you really don't even know how to get started. Maybe you're just not feeling inspired. You listened to last week's episode about choosing a theme, but nothing's really hitting you as a great theme.

How can you take movement material that you've already used in class, so a combination or even a short phrase that the students have been working on within their technical work in the earlier part of the season and turn that into a full dance by manipulating that movement into more robust choreography? So I talked about this really briefly in season one's choreography month, but just delving in a little bit more. When you have some movement material, you don't really need a ton of steps and all different moves and tricks and all sorts of fancy stuff to create a recital dance, right? Typically, I'm thinking recital dance anywhere between maybe two to four minutes tops. And within that time frame, you really could just use one or two simple phrases and manipulate them in all sorts of different ways to make them more interesting.

So real quick, if you're listening to this for a specific class, you're working through some kind of block, just put it in your mind, some little combination, some little phrase, something that you're working on that you might be able to work with to move forward with the choreography. Here are some ways that you can work with it, some different choreographic devices that you can use to change it up. So when the audience is watching it, it doesn't look like they keep doing the same thing over and over again, but essentially that's what it is.

And you're just kind of filtering it through these different choreographic devices. One super simple one, change the direction that students are facing, whether as a group or some students face one direction, other students face another direction, even doing the exact same movement, if half the class faces the back and they all do the same exact movement, you're going to see some really cool cross throughs of some sort of visual element will be added. So just change the direction that the bodies are facing in space.

You can also change the part of the body that is being highlighted or that the movement is being performed with. So for example, if your phrase or your combination includes traveling footwork, could you take a look at what the feet and legs are doing to move you through space and start to play around with what would it look like if the arms were moving in the same way that the legs are moving in that traveling combination that might turn a single traveling combination into both one traveling combination and one combination that students could do in place, but with some really interesting and out there arm movements, because we wouldn't typically move our arms in the same way that we're moving our legs. Or if you've come up with some really cool gestures, maybe that tie into the theme, like we talked about last week, you have these cool gestures and the arms maybe are moving a lot, but you don't feel like the rest of the body is moving.

You could see if there's a way that you can tie that gesture into the legs, the ankle, the foot, maybe articulating in a way that you've only done with the hand so far. So incorporating new and different parts of the body that weren't your focus when you first came up with the movement can also help you create lots more movement material off of one original combination. Then let's look at the musicality.

So this could be as simple as a tempo change, doing literally the exact same steps and movements, but doing them super slow if they started out fast or speeding them up if they started out slow. If you really want to kind of trick the audience into thinking that the movement is different when it's actually the same movement, changing the tempo probably isn't going to fool the average viewer, but changing the accent of the movement could. So for example, if you came up with this combination and it has sharp movements that are accented on counts four and eight, what would it look like if you instead accent whatever movements come on counts one and five? Those might be teeny little transitional steps in the way that you initially choreographed it.

So how does that shift the way it's performed? Once you start playing with timing and musicality and all of these things, if you have a group of dancers or anything more than one dancer, that also opens up the possibility of doing things like a canon. So if one student starts on count one and does the combination exactly the way it was starting on count one, then the next student starts on count two, the next student starts on count three, that obviously adds a ton of layers and depth to the movement that isn't there if they all do them in unison. And then canon can be played with in so many different ways.

They don't have to start count one, count two, count three, they can start count one, count four, count six. What if one student starts on count one and does the movement in slow motion? The next student starts on count four and does it a little bit faster. And then the next student starts on count eight and does it double time.

And they all end at the same time, but they did the same movement just at different tempos. That would be a lot for, first of all, for your dancers to learn and kind of get comfortable with doing that same movement at different tempos and also for the audience to absorb. And it would be a really interesting viewing experience.

So playing with the musicality in so many different ways, whether it's timing, tempo, accent counts, etc. If you want to challenge your dancers a little bit mentally in figuring out like a little brain game with your combination that you're using, you can ask them to reverse it. So this will look completely different to the audience, probably completely unrecognizable from the initial movement theme, if you do the same steps, but in the opposite order of how you taught them.

And then if you really want to get complex, you could do the combination in retrograde. So just to give you an example with words, since you can't see me to demonstrate, if I use the phrase, I love dance, reversing that phrase would be dance love I. So I'm using the same words or the same steps, but I'm putting them in the opposite order. But retrograde would be.

Ek nad evol I. So it'd be actually doing it in reverse order. So if you think about that from a movement standpoint, it gets really complex, generally speaking, to actually go, oh, I have to reverse everything that my body just did. However, in the same way that with words, it can change very, very basic words into something that's really unique.

You're going to come up with some unique movement by throwing in a retrograde. So that's a fun challenge and can really change that movement without you having to actually come up with any new steps. Another device that you can use is accumulation.

And I would also say deconstruction. So with accumulation, you might start with one step and have the dancers repeat it and then add another step. So let's say we start with tandoo.

Then we're going to do tandoo pique. Then we go back to tandoo, tandoo pique fondue. Every time we're going back to the beginning and just adding on one element.

So rather than going through the combination 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, we're going 1, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 4, and you keep coming back to the beginning and accumulating, which for me is actually often how I teach combinations to help dancers with retention. So especially if you're working with newer dancers that aren't that experienced with learning choreography, using that in the choreography can not only help them really grasp it and get that memorization down that might not come so easily to them, but it also makes a more interesting viewing experience for the audience without having to just continually repeat a combination from beginning to end over and over again. And then I would also say deconstruction.

So if you have a combination that you've been using, and then all of a sudden you can start to shave off parts of it until you come to just doing tendu, tendu, tendu, tendu. And the thing with these concepts, I know they're basic, but for an audience member that's not familiar with dance and hasn't watched a lot of dance and doesn't recognize steps like, oh, that's a tendu, that's a jeté, you know, all these things, it can be a really rewarding experience for the audience to watch and go, oh my gosh, I see what's happening. They had this string of steps together.

And now they're deconstructing it. And I recognize that step because now they've done it a bunch of times, giving the audience the opportunity to have that aha moment and go, oh, I know what they're doing. I see what that choreographer does.

Makes your audience more engaged and more interested in watching that choreography. And if you're really feeling super stuck, similar to what I mentioned at the end of last week's episode, when choosing a theme, if you have chosen your theme or you've chosen some movement already for your dance, but you're still feeling really stuck on how to use it, how to move forward from a point that's just not clicking for you, grab the closest book to you or piece of paper or phone, you know, whatever device obviously is probably what's closest to you and open up something random and pick a random word. And if that word is an adjective, perfect.

Use that adjective and say, that's how I'm going to do the movement this time. And then pick two more adjectives and go, okay, so first we're going to do the movement slow, then we're going to do the movement fiery, and then we're going to do the movement sticky. Okay, just three random adjectives.

And maybe that will generate some new idea and you don't have to come up with new steps. You're just using the steps you already have, but putting different random words to it. If it's a verb, then see if you can apply that verb.

So if you will open up your book and the first verb that you see is run. Okay, well, did you have some slower movement, but you can apply this run to it in some way. What does that look like? Are you going to add a run right there in the middle of the dance? They all just start to run.

And then they run into the next part of the movement. Sometimes that's all it takes to break you out of choreographic block and it doesn't have to be that complicated. Another thing you could do is generate a random number on your device or pick a random number from a hat and say, I'm going to do this one step or these three steps or this one combination, however many times as it says on that number that I just picked.

And if you pick seven, you might be thinking, oh my gosh, that's going to be so boring. And then you go, well, that's what it says. It says I'm going to do it seven times.

So how will I layer on these different choreographic devices? So instead of doing it seven times identically, is it going to be, I have six dancers in the class and each one does it one time and then they all do it one time together? Or do they all do it the first time, then one drops out and only six of them do the next one and then one drops out and only five of them do the next one, et cetera. Or do they do one fast, one slow, one medium, one slow, one fast, one medium, one, et cetera. Or do they do seven of them, but they each have a different dynamic to them, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Okay, that's all I've got for you today. I know it's very fast paced, especially compared to last week's episode. But again, guys, I'm just throwing spaghetti at the wall here.

Sometimes that's all choreography is. Something's bound to stick. And sometimes we won't find out until afterwards, like we get the video back after the recital's all done and we go, you know what? Turns out that wasn't my best work.

Sometimes you get so sick of just working on it that you feel in the moment like it's not your best work and then you get the DVD back and you're like, you know what? That was freaking awesome. That turned out great. I've had both of those experiences and sometimes you just have to do it and find out later.

Don't overthink it. Okay. If you need some more resources for this, I'm always going to go back to these same two resources.

So these will be the two that I recommend to you as well. Of course, read the book, The Art of Making Dances by Doris Humphrey. I feel like that's kind of the OG.

And then I also really enjoy The Intimate Act of Choreography by Lynn-Ann Blom and L. Taryn Chaplin. That has a lot of practical exercises in it as well that you can use to generate new movement or manipulate your movement in a way that you can then use it in choreography. So those should both be really helpful to you if you're feeling a little bit stuck.

And in just a moment, I will leave you with some words of inspiration from the OG herself, Doris Humphrey. But first, I do want to say thank you to GB Mystical for the theme music for the show, as well as everyone supporting the show by leaving a review, following us on Instagram at the Casual Dance Teachers Podcast and or hanging out with us in the Casual Dance Teachers Network on Facebook. Thank you so much.

And here is a quote from Doris Humphrey's The Art of Making Dances. There are times when the simple dignity of movement can fulfill the function of a volume of words.