Nachmo, Day 31 - A Show Complete

I just finished choreographing the final dance number of the show.

It’s very odd choreographing a capella. It’s hard to know when you’re done. Most of my pieces for Act I felt too short, so I tried to make Act II longer, to settle into the emotions more. This final piece especially was difficult, as I’m trying to blow the tiny spark of defiance inside me into a roaring flame in one dance number. I’ve become so used to hiding that spark that it was hard to find it for this piece — I’m not entirely sure I succeeded, but I felt a natural end so I wrapped it up. I didn’t want to drag it out too long either.

Submissions for the Nachmo online film festival open up tomorrow. I choreographed this piece with the express purpose of submitting it to that festival. And if it doesn’t get selected in the lottery, I’m releasing it on YouTube. Either way it will be released to the public by the end of February. I am still terrified. I’m not quite halfway done memorizing it. I have no idea if I’ve communicated the story clearly. I’m trying very hard not to think of the reception from the less supportive extended family and college contacts.

But no matter the reception, the fact is, I choreographed an entire long-form dance show in 31 days. I wanted to challenge myself, and I have. I have worked a capella — something I have never, ever done before — for a whole month. I have finished choreography for an entire show — something I have attempted several times but never completed.

I also made a goal for myself to create and stage a full-length dance show before I turn thirty. With this month of focused choreography, that goal is now within reach.

All I have to do is outrun the fear for one more month.

Nachmo, Day 4 - Fear

It is Day 4 of National Choreography Month, and Day 368 of my personal 400 day choreography challenge.

My goal for this month is to choreograph, film, and edit a full-length dance work and submit it to the Nachmo Film Festival in February. Admittedly I'm stretching the definition of 'full-length,' as the show will probably clock in between 30 and 45 minutes, but it will still be the longest single work I've ever done.

I was really feeling the need to do something new and different this year. I've been doing 'choreograph 3-5 songs in a month' for some 8-10 years now, plus I just choreographed 24 pieces in 2022. I wanted a challenge, and decided that a full one-woman show (in the form of a dance film since I live in an artistic wasteland) would be a good challenge for me. I have filmed, edited, and released (previously choreographed) dance films in less than two weeks before, but the longest of those was less than five minutes.

I'm also creating my own sound design for this. Since I want this piece to be my first 'official' semi-professional piece, the last thing I want is to get in hot water for copyright infringement. Given the short production timeline, I figured my time would be better spent creating my own soundtrack rather than trying to track down copyright holders and get permission with so little notice. It also gives me the freedom to do what I want with this piece from a dance perspective -- I'm going to be blending dance styles a lot, and cutting between recorded music to fit the different styles will be jarring and/or inorganic.

This choice to create my own sound design has also lent me my theme for this piece -- all the different ways we communicate without using spoken words. I do have scraps of notes on this theme in my journals and notebooks going back to 2016, so this has been percolating for a while, but I really only started developing the concept last month.

I'm not far enough into this for the fear to have gone away yet. I am TERRIFIED. I'm terrified this show won't flow well. I'm terrified that my in-laws will use this show as another excuse to bully me. I'm terrified that I'm too close to it and won't clean/edit it well. I'm terrified that my very-beginner body percussion passages will be a disgrace to the art form. I'm terrified that I'll get pigeonholed as an artist into this very avant-garde piece that really is a departure from who I generally am as a choreographer. I'm terrified my sound design will be clunky and/or read as 'too cutesy' or too 'manufactured.' I'm terrified that the show will be long and boring and repetitive -- especially since it's going to be kind of a thinking person's show, not easily accessible for the mainstream.

But at the same time -- I've been stuck in a 'choreograph a random song' rut for years and have been long yearning to do something bigger, different, more challenging. I've been wanting to choreograph my own show for over a decade. Fifteen-year-old Kate would have loved to do something like this. If this turns out rather decent, it's a really good 'serious' start for a portfolio, plus it shows everybody who said I couldn't or that I didn't want this bad enough that actually, they're wrong and I can do this and they were wrong about me. This also proves to myself that despite being in an artistic wasteland, I am resourceful and -- dare I say -- skilled enough to create the biggest work of my life. If I can do a work like this here, I can do anything anywhere. I think I need to convince myself of this more than anybody else.

This morning I've been thinking a lot about the words of Czeslaw Milosz as quoted in the liner notes of Daniel Amos' Vox Humana album: 'No-one puts words on paper or paint on canvas doubting. If one doubts, one does so five minutes later...'

I'm trying to not doubt. I'm trying to focus on what a cool concept it is. I'm trying to focus on how much I've wanted to do something like this and how exciting it is to finally be doing it. All I've got to do is press through the fear for the next week or so -- long enough to build up so much momentum and excitement at what's developing that I can silence the fear.

Tune in next time...

National Choreography Month - Preamble

Written 10 December 2021, 7.45pm.

In addition to individual dances, I also have varying full-length dance shows in varying stages of completion. There's the solo tap show (written loosely around a theme of escaping this world, but mostly created as a way to do the recital that my college program director cheated me out of doing -- which, by the way, means the college will not release my diploma to me because I 'didn't fulfil the program requirements.' Because the literal program director who KNEW I needed those credits for doing that recital hated me because I wasn't the sweet perfect little pushover he wanted. There's a whole rant here, but that's not the point of this post), there's the 'character vignettes' show, there's the shows I've written (or at least sketched out) based on Crumbächer's Escape From The Fallen Planet and Daniel Amos' Doppelgänger, there's the video album concept that's been written out for over half a decade and exists in pages of Benesh notation but not much else.

A few months ago, I had a flash of inspiration. I'm reluctant to share too much because it's the first pure idea I've had in a very long time, and I don't want to get caught up in trying to make it marketable like I do with everything else. It's a very close and personal topic for me, and the whole point is to celebrate that specific, personal experience, not to strike a common chord with the masses. It's a show directed to a very specific person and if nobody else gets it except that one person, I will still have succeeded.

I have already set a opening date. It's nearly five years into the future, but honestly I'll probably need that long to get my act together. I will need two children and one extremely good adult male dancer and one relatively simple-yet-large set piece.

But more than that, I need choreography.

I've been going through songs in all genres (even country, which I notoriously strongly dislike) and cherry-picking the best ones for this show. I'm shooting for roughly an hour and a half show, and I have 35 minutes of music already (and literally two full pages of music suggestions from my music nerd Facebook groups to listen through). I was just listening to the first rough iteration of the playlist tonight and it brought tears to my eyes and chills down my spine. This is shaping up really well -- I wasn't quite sure what to expect or how it would go, but I'm pleased at my preliminary progress so far.

So for Nachmo, I'm hoping to start choreographing these songs. I already have an idea of who's going to dance what (character-wise), and the staging is fairly simple -- which is exactly the point. Conveying this special relationship is absolutely key, and if all goes well for this one, I want to do another show for my husband -- and I've already got a bit of a playlist going for that one as well.

My problem will, as usual, more likely be in actually staging it rather than choreographing it. There's the part where I will have to learn the choreography; there's the part where I will have to find (audition?) dancers; the part where I will have to secure the venue and sell tickets -- unless I make it a private showing (which is also still on the table); the part where I will have to actually build the set and hire lighting and sound techs...

I'm trying not to focus on all that for the time being. I can almost guarantee that my biggest problem will be learning the choreography and rehearsing the dancers. And this doesn't happen until I can clear that hurdle.

There is a selfish part of me that wants to stage a show before I'm thirty. The show described above would, assuming it goes ahead on the projected date, happen when I'm thirty-two. I'm still considering staging the aforementioned 'escape' show before my thirtieth birthday (that's such a big number, good lord). It's already mostly choreographed, and if I can manage to conjure up enough discipline to get my lazy butt in the dance studio on any kind of regular basis (and convince my husband that I'm actually not avoiding him, just working on the dream that he 100% knew about from day one), I could theoretically learn it rather quickly. I'm not sure what venue I would use or if maybe I would just busk it and livestream it or something...although it would feel more official if it was in an actual theatre. If I still lived in Saskatchewan, I'd just book the theatre/practice space in town for a couple of nights. There is a theatre about a twenty minute drive away from where I live now... I've never seen it, nor do I know how much it costs to rent it, but that might be something to look into. There's a theatre being built in the town where I live, but there's no ETA on when that will be completed, plus I suspect that one will cost more to rent.

I'm getting off track here.

So basically, I want to start developing the first show idea during Nachmo this year. It'll take far longer than a month (at least a year, if not two) to fully choreograph, but I want to get a good head start.

The second show idea is already mostly choreographed -- I just have to finish up a few loose ends and then learn the whole thing. I was starting to learn chunks of it in fall 2020, before the second lockdown, but then in the six months of existing only in our tiny apartment or behind the coffeepots at work, I lost almost all of it. My goal with this one is to get it fully choreographed and learned by the end of the year (if not completely cleaned).

I also have a dance film in suspended animation that was supposed to happen this year, but the third lockdown put it on pause. That is still slated to go ahead in fall 2022. I still have to memorise and clean this one for myself, as well as for the other performers.

It's not lack of ideas that's holding me back, it's lack of resources. But for the month of January at least, I only have to focus on the one thing I can control, and that's the choreography itself.

Challenge Retrospect

When they call it a thirty-day 'challenge,' they mean it.

I started doing a 30-day choreography challenge on a whim on 2 November. Initially I said it was because I wasn't doing NaNoWriMo and felt I should work on some creative project for the month of November. That was true, but there was a second reason that I didn't make public: I was not in a good place, mentally/emotionally, especially on 2 November. I decided to go practice dance in order to get my mind off how useless I felt, but I needed some reason to even bother practicing. The best way to do that is to set up some kind of accountability system -- like pledging to post each day's work on social media for thirty straight days.
The decision to do this challenge was actually more a first-aid response for a period of acute distress than it was a thought-out plan. Dance, so far, is the only thing I've found that relives some of the mental distress really at all (and even that doesn't work 100% of the time), so by locking myself into a month-long challenge, it meant that I had to do something -- choreograph four sets of eight -- every day. The time it would take to choreograph that much dance would be enough time to let my mind reset and not wander so far down into the abyss.

At first it was fun -- I started out choreographing some stuff I had really wanted to choreograph for some time but just never bit the bullet on it. The response on social media was initially relatively enthusiastic. But within a week, interest and engagement began to drop off. It began to be less fun. I started thinking, how can I get them back? What could I do to get their attention again, to show them I was actually good at something (I hoped)? I began to expect more elaborate and complex things of myself, and I began to expect myself to execute them perfectly. I was trying to make drastic leaps of improvement every day and prove it with a video record of 32 perfect counts every single day, on top of work and school commitments. On Day 18 of the challenge, I had a bit of a meltdown in the studio because I COULD NOT land a double pirouette -- on my good turning side, and it was even a decent turning day. There were plenty of valid reasons that might have explained why it wasn't working -- I hadn't had a lot of sleep, I had just gotten off work, I hadn't eaten in a few hours, I hadn't been doing a whole lot of pointe lately, I was in desperate need of a physio appointment because my body was so out of alignment -- but I wanted to power through all that. The show must go on. Real performers don't get a free pass for ANY of the above reasons. Why should I? What makes me more special than them -- the ones who have actually earned this life? If I planned on even having a tiny hope of being any kind of performing artist, I had to stop with all these excuses -- however valid they might be. Mere hangers-on have not yet earned the right to such pedestrian excuses. But the more I pushed myself, the more angry I became that I wasn't improving.

For years I've been pushing away the idea that I'm an attention whore at heart. I won't make a scene in public, but if I do something -- anything -- I usually quietly expect some recognition. This month really brought that out. Seeing the public engagement with my posts fall off so sharply brought this right out into the light. I'm not the kind of person who gets insecure if her selfies don't get a certain percentage of Facebook/Instagram likes, but I do get insecure when I post a dance excerpt that I'm proud of or that shows some growth and LITERALLY nobody says anything. I don't know how this works in the brains of other people, but in my head the logic is 'nobody noticed. Again. As usual. See? You're not good enough. You're not worthy of their attention. If you weren't such a crappy dancer, maybe they'd notice you. You're not working hard enough. Quit lazing about and improve already. If you don't, you've no business calling yourself a dancer. So prove it. Now.'

So I push harder. Don't give me this 'it takes time' crap -- how then do you explain all those sixteen-year-olds who are prima ballerinas of companies like the New York City Ballet or the American Ballet or the Royal Ballet or the National Ballet of Canada? You cannot tell me it takes time, because for them it did not. For them it took sheer determination. And if I'm not at that level -- or at least reasonably close -- then apparently I don't have enough determination. My body has an expiry date. My window into the dance world shrinks with every second I draw breath. The clock is ticking, the hourglass is running out. How many metaphors do I need to use to get you to understand the urgency of the situation? And how many times do I have to remind myself of this before I actually start improving?

I'm at a loss. I am too old to pretend to be serious about this if I'm not going to be seriously good. But I cannot, cannot give this up. I chose this life. Now I need to earn it. This challenge is another stepping stone to that -- it makes me practice and it (hopefully) helps me gain a social media presence, if only among my friends and associates. It gives me visibility. And hopefully it will give me ability enough to earn that visibility.

Music Day

This is my Saturday-morning-drive-to-prayer-walk/community-clean-up-day song. (Well, actually, I play the whole album on those days, but this song is one of the reasons why. Urban Renewal is the other one, but it's not on iTunes.)

I'm the type of person who listens to a song (or artist) because it challenges me or generally makes me think. It's one of the main reasons I hardly ever listen to 'secular' music -- let's face it, there's not much to chew on in a lyric like whoa oh oh, you don't know you're beautiful.

And this song is a challenge. Are they working harder at what we think is wrong; Than we are at what we know is right... Are they? Are we? Am I? If not, what do I need to do to change that? It's a question I constantly need to ask myself. It's so easy to settle for 'good enough' and no longer strive for 'best.'

(Also, the beat in this song is just way too catchy to resist.)

Title: More Sold Out

Artist: White Heart

Album: Emergency Broadcast

Year: 1987

Label: Sparrow Records

iTunes here; YouTube here.

Are we gonna sit back and let them take control

When we've got His power in our soul...

Problem Solved

Remember the little conundrum I was in last week? Trying to decide between two different plots for my November novel?

I fixed it.

Yup.

I'm doing them both.

Yes, both, at the same time. The plan is to work on them side-by-side and get them both to 50,000 words in November. I mean, I've done this one novel at a time for six events now, I think it's time for a challenge.

I'm not so much worried about keeping up with the word count, I'm more concerned about switching in my head from one plot to the next, as they're both quite different. (One is about a girl who finds an abandoned film studio hidden practically in her aunt and uncle's backyard; the other is about a man whose wife is -- seemingly randomly -- kidnapped. Over the ensuing investigation he finds that she had a brother who was also kidnapped nearly thirty years before. Coincidence?)

Thanksgiving - A Challenge

This morning I was late for my ballet class, and in a desperate way.
Or so I thought.
When I arrived, I found that the previous class had gone late -- a rare occurrence. Therefore I was still technically not late as my class hadn't begun yet.
As I was speed-changing into my practice clothes, it dawned on me that that was God's undeserved grace right there. I didn't deserve this kind of break; it was my fault I'd left my house late in the first place. Why He saw fit to give me that extra few minutes I don't know, and perhaps I never will. But the fact is He gave it to me.
Not long ago, I heard a speaker talking about the perfect holiness and good goodness of God. He talked about how people always say, "Well, if God is so good, why does He let bad stuff happen?"
The speaker said that is entirely the wrong perspective. We as humans are pure evil without Jesus purifying us. The question instead is 'Why should God let anything good happen at all in this world? We sure as heck don't deserve it.'
God gives us a beautiful sunset every night. Why should He allow us to see such beauty? We don't deserve it.
God gives us food and clean water. Why should He allow us even enough to survive, never mind give us excess amounts of it? We don't deserve it.
God gives us the air to breathe and the chest to breathe it. Why should He not only let us live, but Himself be intimately involved in our moment-to-moment survival? We don't deserve it.
God gives us (especially in Canada) warm clothes and blankets on our beds. Why should He allow us to be warm and comfortable? We don't deserve it.
The list goes on.
And this morning an idea struck me. Why not keep track of every instance of God's grace that I see every day, for a period of time? Like the 'counting blessings' thing, but rather than just focusing for ten minutes on a couple of big things (house; bed; food; clothes), let's focus more on the little things. Like the times my laziness should get me into trouble, but it doesn't. Like the fact that God could have withdrawn His hand from around my heart and let it stop two paragraphs ago but He didn't. Like the fact that He hasn't allowed the motor to fall out of my rattletrap vehicle yet even though it probably should have two years ago.
And then I thought, heck, (Canadian) Thanksgiving is right around the corner; this coming Monday to be exact. Perfect.
The thought continued... I should get a bunch of people involved in this.


So I'm going to go out on a proverbial limb here and present a challenge for both you and me.
Throughout the day, as things happen (or don't) by God's grace, write them down (or use the voice recording app on your iPhone, whatever). We'll do this for... let's say two weeks, starting Sunday morning, the ninth of October. At the end of the two weeks (the twenty-second), look back over the lists. If you (and I) want to continue after that, great; but if not, hopefully we all have a greater appreciation of just how much God does for us in our day-to-day lives. If you want to do a blog post detailing every instance you saw or just what you learned from the experience, that would be interesting as well... you can link to it either here in the comments on this post or hopefully I will be publishing another post as sort of a follow-up after two weeks and you can link to it there. I would love to see what God shows you. Note that it's not a requirement that you post about it, but you might enjoy thinking over it all again.
I have to say I'm really looking forward to this. I'm also curious to know who's going to try this along with me... feel free to comment!

(If you're reading this several weeks, months, or even years from now, try it for yourself. Set aside two or three weeks and give it a shot. I'd love to hear your thoughts and experiences.)

P.S. -- Bonus points if you caught both of the Lecrae references in this post.