Choregraphy, part 4????

Okay, I'm back to the whole choreography story again. You see, we're still in the process of working on the number that we will be performing on March 20. And, I'm only a little over half way through detailing all the steps and pieces for it.

One of the hardest parts is trying to work on staging and positions for so many people at one time. I don't have enough cats to cover all the dancers (thank goodness), and they don't do well taking instructions from me. Now, they are wonderful at improvisational forms of movement and dance but just don't ask them to repeat what I try to teach! So, I'm often left trying to figure out how to take some great idea in my head and transform it into reality with six to nine dancers on any given occasion, it's quite a brain twister.

So tonight's only goal was to rework the beginning of the number, really only the first minute or so. I had ideally wanted everyone to do floor work at the beginning however it’s not a given for all dancers. So, in order to make sure it worked for everyone…it was back to the drawing board.

Now some people may think that would be an inconvenience and not worth the effort. However, I like to think of it as a greater challenge. It’s like someone reads a paragraph you wrote and says this is good, but you can’t use these five words in it…come back when you have it rewritten. It forces you to distill down the essence of the movement or the feeling you’re trying to capture and rework (or rewrite) until you come up with a better product.

And tonight although we didn't make substantial progress in the number we did come up with some nice movements that will be fabulous on stage. It was nice, easy and collaborative evening and I think we walked away feeling productive. We still have some floor work included (my thighs are killing me tonight) but we also have some new height dimensions that weren’t there in the original plan. The good news is that we still have three more practices to finalize everything and I have three more weeks to work out details if needed, yeah!