16 December 2017

Choreography Ramblings

13 December 2017, 5.46pm.

That thirty-day choreography challenge has been SO good for me. I am in a MUCH better place mentally and emotionally right now, and I have momentum and motivation for at least one aspect of my creative life (my writing is still pretty dead in the water -- one of the reasons I haven't posted here much lately). I'm starting to tiptoe into the next phase of my choreographic dream... I don't want to get into too much detail until I'm in the final stages of this phase.

This is probably the phase of this whole dream that intimidates me the most. It's the phase where I have to start getting other people involved. For someone like me, who has spent her whole life trying to be independent, trying not to be a nuisance, trying not to need other people for even a few seconds, it goes completely against over a decade and a half of self-discipline even just to ask if my friends would be willing to help with this. I feel more vulnerable asking my friends for help than I do filming myself doing brand-new (raw and unedited) choreography on my phone and then posting it all over social media.

I've already been planning National Choreography Month in January. I am more excited for this thing this year than any other year I've done it. I blame the thirty-day challenge last month for that. Usually for Nachmo (that's what it's called...) I do something like, 'choreograph X number of dances this month.' This January I was going to modify that to 'thirty-two (or sixty-four) counts per day,' but having just done that this November, I want something a little more challenging than that. I haven't settled on exactly what that looks like yet, but I have a few viable ideas.

The other problem is I don't do a lot of solo choreography. Most of the music that inspires me is more suited for groups (or at least two or three people). I used up everything that inspired any kind of solo dance in November for the challenge. So now if I want to show off anything I choreograph, I'm going to need to find other dancers. This terrifies me, for the same reasons mentioned above -- I hate imposing on people, to the point where I will go without if it means I don't ask anything of anyone. People have such busy lives now that asking for a mere ten seconds of their time is often intimidating -- never mind days or weeks.

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