My Experience:
The Beginning
Since I was young i’ve had a passion for dance and always knew one day I would choreograph a dance of my own. The Menz Dance program i’m a part of at my high school provides students with the opportunity to choreograph and teach a dance to our class. I quickly jumped at this opportunity to finally do what i’ve been longing to do for years now. Having no prior experience choreographing, it made for a slow start filled with many questions about how to even begin this process. I had multiple songs in mind that I wanted to use, so I started out by just dancing to those songs as well as any other that I liked to dance to. For me, Michael Jackson provided the best music to dance to. It brought out true creativity and provoked a lot of solid movement.
Half Way Done
Once I reached about the minute thirty mark in my dance I began to have trouble creating new movement. I found myself repeating old movement and struggled for a while to break through the creative barrier holding me back from progressing with my dance. During this time music began to cloud my mind, the constant urge to bump out new, original movement prevented my body from moving naturally. Everything that usually felt natural and good to me began to feel strenuous and repetitive. Even though when I looked back at the video footage my movement seemed better than my mind made it out to be. There was a huge disconnect between my mind and body, one I had never encountered before in dance. I have certainly run into this when weight lifting and rock climbing but never dance. Trying to overcome this obstacle of breaking my usual dance flow was something I hadn't ever tried to do before. It made for a very stressful anxious mindset, one that is unhealthy when wanting nothing more than my creativity to flourish. In order to break this trend, that I came to call "dancers block", I began experimenting with new ways of inspiring original movement.
Trouble Shooting
The first method I tried was to create movement without music. It ended up working extremely well, allowing me to breakdown each piece of movement mentally instead of relying on my body to feel its natural groove. This method proved to be more productive in the mental state I was in and helped me create two new phrases that I was able to add on to later and and ended up using in my dance. Another method I found to be useful was switching the song I was dancing to as soon as I lost inspiration. The rapid changing of music provoked eclectic styles and allowed my mind to take my movement to very creative and obscure places. These two methods as well as just putting on songs I liked to dance to all helped me greatly in progressing with my dance and to all choreographers out there who suffer from dancers block, I encourage you to try these methods and hopefully they will work for you too.
The Crux
Once I was at the point where I had a basic outline of the whole dance i was faced with the most difficult part of the choreographing process. This being the time where I had to figure out how I was going to properly link my phrases and decide what movement would absolutely be a part of the dance. This period of time lasted approximately three weeks and was absolute mental chaos. With so much on my mind about how each part of my dance would be configured it caused me to have increased levels of stress and anxiety that I had never experienced before. It was an extremely tense time for me mentally. Every time I would think about my dance my heart would begin pounding out of my chest, filled with so much worry and uncertainty about what and what was not going to be used. At the time of this chaotic period I had talked to Katy, one of my mentors, about what I was feeling. She compared my experience to the artistic process that many artists go through just before breaking through and revealing total clarity. What she was saying made a lot of sense to me and I believed that I would gap this barrier that stood between my chaotic state and the beginning of the finished project. About a week later I broke through and finally had the skeletal structure of my dance set in stone. This was a relief unlike any other and from that moment on my confidence in what I created began to skyrocket and I was feeling so much better about my dance.
Teaching
Along with creating movement I also had to focus on staging the whole thing and teaching it to the kids in my class. For our performance I was given 14 students to work with. I had about 2 months to teach them the dance, with only 30 minutes a day together. It was crucial that everybody stayed focused in order for my dance to come together. As a peer working with these students in my class, it was extremely difficult. They showed much less respect and attentiveness to me compared to how they act towards our dance teacher. Keeping these kids focused was a great challenge and it took a while for me to formulate effective teaching methods that allowed for as much work to be done as possible within our time constraints.
Choreography Notes
Throughout my teaching experience I took notes on what worked well so that I could continue to better myself as a teacher, the notes I took are as follows. 1.Break down counts for students who find it helpful 2.Run through the movement slowly without music then run full speed without music and then run with music 3.Use students who have the movement down to assist others 4.Your not their friend you're their choreographer 5.Run it until you're satisfied, not them.
The End
Teaching my dance to students has been an incredible learning experience. It has improved my ability to take on a leadership role, communicate and keep the attention of a large audience, as well as strengthened my ability to deal with people's specific struggles. Although being a difficult task I'm very happy I did it because it has taught me real life skills that will be applicable to many things I do in the future. These being my leadership in the outdoors and ability to organize/handle many different types of people in a workplace. I look forward to putting these skills to use and can’t wait to finish my next project.
The Beginning
Since I was young i’ve had a passion for dance and always knew one day I would choreograph a dance of my own. The Menz Dance program i’m a part of at my high school provides students with the opportunity to choreograph and teach a dance to our class. I quickly jumped at this opportunity to finally do what i’ve been longing to do for years now. Having no prior experience choreographing, it made for a slow start filled with many questions about how to even begin this process. I had multiple songs in mind that I wanted to use, so I started out by just dancing to those songs as well as any other that I liked to dance to. For me, Michael Jackson provided the best music to dance to. It brought out true creativity and provoked a lot of solid movement.
Half Way Done
Once I reached about the minute thirty mark in my dance I began to have trouble creating new movement. I found myself repeating old movement and struggled for a while to break through the creative barrier holding me back from progressing with my dance. During this time music began to cloud my mind, the constant urge to bump out new, original movement prevented my body from moving naturally. Everything that usually felt natural and good to me began to feel strenuous and repetitive. Even though when I looked back at the video footage my movement seemed better than my mind made it out to be. There was a huge disconnect between my mind and body, one I had never encountered before in dance. I have certainly run into this when weight lifting and rock climbing but never dance. Trying to overcome this obstacle of breaking my usual dance flow was something I hadn't ever tried to do before. It made for a very stressful anxious mindset, one that is unhealthy when wanting nothing more than my creativity to flourish. In order to break this trend, that I came to call "dancers block", I began experimenting with new ways of inspiring original movement.
Trouble Shooting
The first method I tried was to create movement without music. It ended up working extremely well, allowing me to breakdown each piece of movement mentally instead of relying on my body to feel its natural groove. This method proved to be more productive in the mental state I was in and helped me create two new phrases that I was able to add on to later and and ended up using in my dance. Another method I found to be useful was switching the song I was dancing to as soon as I lost inspiration. The rapid changing of music provoked eclectic styles and allowed my mind to take my movement to very creative and obscure places. These two methods as well as just putting on songs I liked to dance to all helped me greatly in progressing with my dance and to all choreographers out there who suffer from dancers block, I encourage you to try these methods and hopefully they will work for you too.
The Crux
Once I was at the point where I had a basic outline of the whole dance i was faced with the most difficult part of the choreographing process. This being the time where I had to figure out how I was going to properly link my phrases and decide what movement would absolutely be a part of the dance. This period of time lasted approximately three weeks and was absolute mental chaos. With so much on my mind about how each part of my dance would be configured it caused me to have increased levels of stress and anxiety that I had never experienced before. It was an extremely tense time for me mentally. Every time I would think about my dance my heart would begin pounding out of my chest, filled with so much worry and uncertainty about what and what was not going to be used. At the time of this chaotic period I had talked to Katy, one of my mentors, about what I was feeling. She compared my experience to the artistic process that many artists go through just before breaking through and revealing total clarity. What she was saying made a lot of sense to me and I believed that I would gap this barrier that stood between my chaotic state and the beginning of the finished project. About a week later I broke through and finally had the skeletal structure of my dance set in stone. This was a relief unlike any other and from that moment on my confidence in what I created began to skyrocket and I was feeling so much better about my dance.
Teaching
Along with creating movement I also had to focus on staging the whole thing and teaching it to the kids in my class. For our performance I was given 14 students to work with. I had about 2 months to teach them the dance, with only 30 minutes a day together. It was crucial that everybody stayed focused in order for my dance to come together. As a peer working with these students in my class, it was extremely difficult. They showed much less respect and attentiveness to me compared to how they act towards our dance teacher. Keeping these kids focused was a great challenge and it took a while for me to formulate effective teaching methods that allowed for as much work to be done as possible within our time constraints.
Choreography Notes
Throughout my teaching experience I took notes on what worked well so that I could continue to better myself as a teacher, the notes I took are as follows. 1.Break down counts for students who find it helpful 2.Run through the movement slowly without music then run full speed without music and then run with music 3.Use students who have the movement down to assist others 4.Your not their friend you're their choreographer 5.Run it until you're satisfied, not them.
The End
Teaching my dance to students has been an incredible learning experience. It has improved my ability to take on a leadership role, communicate and keep the attention of a large audience, as well as strengthened my ability to deal with people's specific struggles. Although being a difficult task I'm very happy I did it because it has taught me real life skills that will be applicable to many things I do in the future. These being my leadership in the outdoors and ability to organize/handle many different types of people in a workplace. I look forward to putting these skills to use and can’t wait to finish my next project.