Beautiful Plans 12.1: Creating Dance for Performance

The Practice Choreography I developed for Beautiful Technique gives you a chance to see the movements that I’ve taught in context, and illustrates some basic ideas about dance as performance.

When I create dance, whether it is improvisation, choreography for myself or another soloist, or choreography for a group, I think about 5 things:

·         Clean technique

·         Emotional expression

·         Musical interpretation

·         Dynamic range

·         Stylistic integrity

Clean technique makes dance more polished.  It’s possible to create compelling performances without clean technique, but it’s much more challenging.  Think of a metaphor from the visual arts—a great artist can make great art with no classes and no tools, but training and art supplies make it much easier.  Or think about cooking:  having high quality ingredients makes it easier to put together a great meal.  Clean technique helps you to realize your full potential.

Emotional expression and musical interpretation transform technique into dance.  Dance to the music.  Give it shape, and express its mood.  Think of yourself as water, and music as the bed and banks of the stream you flow through.  Rest against the music, and let it determine your form.  Show yourself as well.  Use the gestures and body language that let your personality come through.

When you are training, it’s important to be as precise in your movements as possible, but it’s often better to be a little more free in dance performance.  If you are creating an artistic piece that is meant to seem mechanical, then it’s appropriate to perform in that style.  But, for traditional belly dance, be warm and alive:  react to the music and your environment, and acknowledge your audience.  If you find it difficult to really be present—if all you can think about is what step you should be doing next—continue to train.  Training puts dance into your body, so that beautiful movement happens automatically.  Performing is a little like driving a car on a busy highway:  you will be overwhelmed if you are still learning to drive.

Belly dance music is typically based on nested call and response phrases, and a pattern of repetition with variation.  Follow this format with your movements.  The music I’ve used in the practice choreography has an intro, 3 sections plus a bridge, and an “outro” or coda.  The first section, or section A, is repeated four times; section B and C each repeat 3 times.  The steps in my choreography follow. Each time a section repeats, the basic moves in that section also repeat, but with variation.  Call-and-response repetition within these sections is echoed in symmetrically repeated movement, expressed on one side of the body then the other. 

Dance to both rhythm and melody, keeping the beat, and matching the sounds of the melody instruments.  The tonal systems of Middle Eastern music use a much greater variety of pitch than Western scales.  This rich tonal color gives Middle Eastern music a more voice-like quality, creating phrases that evoke the impression of imploring, moans, questioning, sighs of contentment, and other human communication.  Follow these cues.

To further guide your movement choices, think about dynamic range and stylistic integrity.

Dynamic range is the texture of dance.  In my own style, I like to use many types of movements, but I also follow the convention of authentic Middle Eastern dance, creating variety through changes in orientation, direction, level, tempo, and intensity.  Dynamic range provides the contrast that makes each movement stand out.  By alternating between soft and strong, elegant and earthy, fluid and staccato, you create dance that is rich and deep.

Guard against too much variety by making sure your dance has stylistic integrity. A dance with integrity is a dance that makes sense.  The pieces fit together, and feel intuitively right.  When this fit is lacking, performances seem fake or flat.  So, make sure everything matches:  movement, music, costume, context, and venue.  For traditional belly dance, just follow the music and the conventions of the style you’re working in, and choose the moves that are the best fit for your body, abilities, and personality.

If you are inspired to innovate, finding the right balance of elements is more of a challenge.  A good way to think about balancing range and integrity is return to the metaphor of cooking:  we get great sensual enjoyment from complex flavors and complementary pairings, but just throwing together random flavors seldom yields an appetizing result.  When you are trying something new, you will almost certainly have to do many experiments to get things right.  So, have fun experimenting!  You often learn more from experiments that fail than from those that succeed, so don’t be discouraged by false starts.  All the work you do will always help you down the road, so remember to always see the big picture.  The care that you put into your dancing will show in your final product.

→ Next in Beautiful Plans: Diagram: “Azure” (Solace/Iman) (Practice Choreography & Second Performance)

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