Coming up at the end of March is my dance team’s annual signature event Bisonette’s Ball. As a member of the team, we’re encouraged to all perform a solo piece as a part of the event – the only problem being the fact that I’m not a huge fan of choreographing. I decided that instead of choreographing the way I usually do, finding a song first and then choreographing, I decided to try it in a slightly different way. I found three of the most random songs I could – an indie punk song, a rock song, and a pop song – and started just dancing. I would choreograph about sixteen counts to one song before trying to do the same choreo on one of the other songs to see if I could adapt the moves to a different style, different beat, different tempo, etc. What I found was that as I switched the songs around and reworked the moves to match I was actually able to come up with more ideas and more variety of moves than I typically think I do. I was using different styles and finding ways to mesh them together into a coherent final product. For me, this relates to the idea of inspiration since I pushed myself outside of my comfort zone and forced myself to find new ways of doing old tasks. After doing this for a couple of hours, I found myself a lot more comfortable with the idea of actually choreographing a public piece after playing around and finding new ways to mix and match my favorite aspects of dance and music in ways that I otherwise never would have thought to do.
Leave a Reply