I actually thought this would happen much sooner. The early years of choreography were so prolific -- right up until college, I would literally choreograph for hours at a time, every single day. I think after the first year, I was up to 60-some completed projects. This obviously slowed down when college got into the mix, but I never truly stopped.
Until M died.
After that, I hit a wall, both in writing and in dance. M was my creative partner for both, and without her, life felt completely void of -- well, life. She died in September 2018, and in the next two years I choreographed maybe five pieces. All of them were like pulling teeth. She had been my only real source of choreographic inspiration and encouragement, and without that, there was no reason to push myself to keep creating these hack jobs, these robotic simulations of feeling that really meant nothing. All my work felt boring and repetitive.
I keep track of my completed choreography by putting the songs in an iTunes playlist and by entering the titles into a Pages document, along with the dates of completion. When I added that song to the playlist today and saw the little words '100 songs' at the bottom of the iTunes window, I felt immediately driven to message M and tell her about my milestone, like I did with most all my choreography/writing-related accomplishments.
But I couldn't. And there was no-one else still alive who would get how truly, fantastically exciting this was. M would have freaked out -- enthusiastic run-on sentences in all caps, loudly proclaiming my achievement, even though her output far outpaced mine. I never realised how much her zany excitement motivated me until it wasn't there anymore.
Don't get me wrong, I am proud of myself. It took nine years to get here, and for this chronic procrastinator to actually finish 100 pieces is a huge milestone. (Plus there's the saying that you have to do a thing a hundred times to be good at it... so I guess I've leveled up now?) I started seriously choreographing in earnest in an attempt to prove my mother wrong when she said I didn't want it enough. A hundred pieces -- some 1,100 hand-notated pages -- later, I'd like to think I've made my point. But my excitement is tempered by not being able to share it with the one person in my life who really cared about me choreographing stuff.
Here's to the next 100 pieces. Hopefully there's less loss to dance about.
