Nachmo, Day 20 - Process Shift (The Tech I'm Using)

I've been slowly changing how I write choreography throughout the month.

 

Since 2012, I've written all my dances out on lined looseleaf first, then either transcribed them into Benesh Movement Notation (ballet/jazz) or typed them into Pages (tap dances).

This month though, I started using my Rocketbook erasable notebook. Since it's set up to scan the pages directly to my email, that way I could continue writing by hand like normal, and then immediately have no-effort digitization AND email backup in one fell swoop. And it does work well. But the Rocketbook has limited pages and I was choreographing faster than I was uploading/backing up.

 

I sort of accidentally fell into this habit of jotting down choreography notes in the Notion app on my phone whenever I didn't have the Rocketbook on me. Then I'd continue working on the notes in Notion on my laptop, with the iTunes/'Music' miniplayer in the corner.

Two days ago, I discovered that if you hover the cursor over the miniplayer and scroll, you can scrub through the song without having to click back and forth between Notion and iTunes.

That absolutely changed the game.

Now I can keep the cursor in one place (hovering over the scrub bar) and replay 8 counts to my heart's content, while simultaneously typing notes without the extra hassle (yes, I know exactly how 'first world problems' this sounds) of clicking back and forth between the two (and forgetting which one was selected before starting to type). This means I'm losing my train of thought WAY less, and the fact that I'm doing a show on my lived experience with memory loss should tell you how frustratingly easy it is to lose my train of thought... and how difficult it is to find my train of thought again once I've lost it.

This tiny change has launched me into creative hyperspeed. I'd already half-taught my devices not to autocorrect my tap dance shorthand so I'm not facing that friction much. I'm also not sweating the specific counts as much as usual (mostly for the sake of doing a lot of output during Nachmo proper), replacing specific subdivisions with timestamps because those are MUCH easier to find when you're dealing with jazz music. I just don't have the brain space or energy to try to find the 1 and hold a very fleeting idea in my head long enough to figure out which sixteenth count I'm starting the step on while following the saxophone melody. I'm NaNoWriMo-ing this thing. Get it in writing and figure out the pacing later. I've always let the music's own dynamics and rhythms inspire me, so I'm hoping with the help of the timestamps I'll be able to hear what I was thinking later.

As far as stats, so far today I've done almost three minutes' worth of choreography. I've just finished the song I was on, and that officially brings me to the 30-minute mark of the show -- or, my goal for Nachmo 2025. Obviously, we're going to keep going and see how far we get. Maybe choreographing the entire 54-minute show in a month isn't entirely out of reach after all. I hadn't planned to speedrun creation and production the way I did with Sottovoce, and I think it might be harder to do such a thing this time. The things that made Sottovoce so unconventional for me were the things that made it forgiving... I was suffering with memory loss even then, but the lack of set music meant I could hide the blank spots in editing a little bit (that's why the editing in Sottovoce is so janky. Almost every single cut in that film is covering a 2-3 minute mental blank). Here, I am working with set music, and while that may make it easier to memorise, that will mean I actually have to know the choreography, at tempo... all 54 minutes of it.

I do notice that letting my work breathe/not choreographing at the absolute cutting edge of my ability (as of 2019) means I cover more musical ground a lot faster, and hopefully it'll be easier for my broken brain to actually learn it. I'm only hoping it's not too boring for the audience.

Nachmo, Day 10 - Breathing And Reruns

Rehearsals have officially started for my next theatre show, and we're officially choreographing this show out of order.

Also, yesterday, I hit the 10-minute mark, as in ten total minutes of music choreographed. This is on pace for my stated goal of 30 minutes of choreography during the challenge proper. (The show is actually 54 minutes long, but I'm trying to be reasonable about my expectations for a 31-day challenge.) (Obviously I am going to try to exceed thirty minutes, but I will be happy with thirty if I don't manage any more than that.)

The mouse incident did have me lagging behind a bit, but yesterday I went on a tear and choreographed over two minutes' worth of material. Today so far I've done nearly another minute, but I know where I want to go from there so I should be able to knock out a bit more tonight. I might need the buffer for this weekend, as I have a meeting for a potential choreography gig, dinner with the in-laws, and a long rehearsal with my remote choreography gig.

As for the show itself, I choreographed the first two pieces, then skipped ahead due to overwhelm and did the sixth song. I'm now on the seventh song, and that will take us into the intermission.

Things are starting to take shape a bit -- I've got a couple of motifs, and am trying not to worry too much that I'm grossly overusing them. I'm trying very hard to let the piece breathe a little bit more and not try to stuff tricks and overly complex rhythm changes into EVERY SINGLE SUBDIVISION of the music. That can be impressive, but my pre-pandemic work especially suffers from too much razzle dazzle rather than too little. I hate how slow and boring modern dance is, so I overcompensate by overstuffing the music with a volley of sounds like gunshots on a battlefield. I am trying to recognise this when it happens and pull back on the reins, just a little tiny bit. (I'm hoping this will also 1. be easier on my memory once it's time to learn it, and 2. communicate the whole 'memory loss' theme a bit more.)

I'm really proud of how the playlist turned out. Honestly, I stuck in a couple of early-'90s smooth jazz songs I had, then searched 'melancholy vapourwave' on YouTube. I got exactly two videos as a result, but both videos supplied me with enough music to populate the rest of the playlist. As I listened to those YouTube mixes, I slotted each contender into a rough song order on my Notion tab for the show. When my final paycheque came in on the 30th, I bought the songs and stuck them in the playlist. I listened to the playlist exactly once through, on the 31st. I think I made two or three swaps, but the song order is actually largely the same as originally written down on the fly. The transitions are really smooth, and the 'vibe' throughout the whole show flows and shifts really well (other than the second song, as discussed in a previous Nachmo update). That's incredible, considering I heard some of these songs exactly twice in my entire life before the first of January. (Usually my playlists are full of songs that I have known for years, if not decades, that I am intimately familiar with and could sing to you, note-for-note, in their entirety.)

 

This music takes me back to a simpler time. And one of the biggest things about memory loss that surprised me was how much my brain simply played 'reruns' of memories of simpler times -- memories I hadn't even thought about in decades. My brain played reruns of every memory I ever had at my grandparents' old house in the country (I was not quite five years old when they moved into town), long-forgotten moments in the trailer we lived in when I was a child, and many hours of 2021-2023 slipped past me as my brain kept me sitting in the sunlight in my old pink bedroom (which by then no longer existed as mine, or as pink, for that matter). I couldn't really think any new thoughts -- there were none to think, I couldn't hold onto the concepts long enough to match them together into a new thought -- so my mind just dumped me into my past, as vivid as if I was still there. I completely understand now why old people talk so much about the old days -- as far as we're concerned, we are still living there, still in 1959 or 1982 or 1997, still living in those fleeting moments before everything changed, before wi-fi, before iPhones, before the pandemic, before all the loss, before freaking hipster music.

 

It was a comfort at times to live in the golden years again, but it also stopped me from engaging with the present, from making new works and new friends. I would wake up from driving my old Pontiac Montana down the highway in 2012 and find myself in a year I didn't know in a world I didn't recognise with people I'd never met.

Anyway, that's part of the experience I'm trying to capture in the show, especially as we move into the second act -- that disconnect between physical reality and our mind's reality, and how we don't even know -- or can't control -- that it's happening.

The Drafts Of Yester-Decade

Recently I went way back into my blog drafts folder... and I mean way back. I often scroll back about 2-3 years, but this time I went all the way back to the very beginning, to the first couple of posts I wrote back in 2010 and never published... probably for the first time since I wrote them.

There was a lot of little stories of my life written there that I had forgotten about. And in a way those made me sad. I knew I was a brighter, happier person then, but reading these posts has put into sharp contrast just how much Brittney's and my cousin's deaths destroyed who I used to be... and who I wanted to be.

I still miss that person.

The other day I contacted an old college friend who I haven't spoken to since 2020, when I was banned by my in-laws from anything I used to do or to be. I've been getting tired of being locked in the prison of my own mind, and I'm starting to rebel. I've volunteered for a local theatre. I'm starting to listen to music again. I'm starting to text people back. I'm starting to read the Bible and watch church services again.

I want my life back.

That may never happen. In September, I sustained a back injury at work, and seven months later, it is causing more issues than it did the week it first happened.

I have not yet brought up the subject of future dance endeavours with my physiotherapist. They know I have a history of dance, but they haven't asked for details, and I haven't mentioned it. I haven't needed to -- there are still no dance opportunities here anyway.

I am a different person now than I was fourteen years ago, but I'm not convinced it's a good thing. Perhaps I made some decisions that looked stupid -- but honestly, I made those decisions from a place of deep trust, and I never felt more free and 'whole' than I did back when I was living out on a limb every day of my life.

The freedom and joy in those old posts are palpable, even after sitting on a dusty server somewhere for well over a decade. I have not felt that since before my uncle left my aunt in January 2015. I was 21 years old.

All these tragedies I never asked for ate up all the best years of my life. My body was a well-oiled machine, and my mind was sharp and quick. But it was all wasted as I spent those years drowning in an endless ocean of grief. Now the grief has dulled, but both my body and my mind are no longer what they were. I wasted all of that potential, all those years... on something that wasn't even my fault and was completely beyond my control. It's so unfair. It's so unfair.

I'll never be able to get those years back.

Dance Film...? (An Update And Small Vent)

At the beginning of the year, I swore to myself that I would ACTUALLY make two dance films this year.

I knocked out one (Sottovoce) almost immediately, and allowed myself to do a smaller, simpler one for the second. I finally picked one, and have been trying to memorise the thing since July.

It's still not memorised.

This is the only weekend I can film it, as this will be the last weekend of the year that I have access to this location and I REALLY don't want to film it indoors (in the same studio as Sottovoce to boot). I want to infuse colour and life into this dead town and filming outside in the fall leaves is the best way I can see to do that.

I also can't break a promise to myself again.

The only promise to myself I've kept this year so far is to finish the Kyrie rewrite. Don't get me wrong, that was a MASSIVE accomplishment, but I don't want the rest of this year to be a total washout.

I've been doing all the right things. I've been running this piece every spare second I have for three months. I didn't have access to a tap floor until tonight so I've been drilling the choreography into my head, knowing that only goes so far but wanting to give myself the best possible advantage.

I wanted to film this thing tomorrow. But it SUCKS.

The choreography is (mostly) great. But my memory -- apparently now my achilles' heel -- is doing its best to sabotage me at every. single. turn (literally and figuratively).

I don't want to fail yet again. I've broken this promise to myself so many times. I don't want to fail again. I don't want to fail again. But it looks like I may have no other option.

Checkmate

I've talked before about my struggles with memory loss. This frustration with myself came to a head while producing my most recent dance film, but it has long been seeping into every aspect of my creative life and eroding my confidence.

In mid-February, I attended a tap festival. For an extra fee, one could present a piece before the festival faculty for feedback. Terrified but wanting to know where I stood in such a diverse field, I paid the fee and then agonised over which piece to present.

I've choreographed so many pieces, and since my college years, a good many of them have been solo tap dances (because they were easy to film and post on Instagram to show that I really was working on my performance skills -- not that that convinced anybody, apparently). At first my plan was to memorise one of the more recent works, but as the film became a behemoth that demanded every single second of my free time, I decided to fall back onto a much older piece that's been my mental noodling piece since I choreographed it in 2018. This was -- ironically -- mostly because I had it completely memorised and could whip it out at will. My feet ran through it on my work break at least every other day without much thought. I had this piece.

But as the presentation time drew near, the looming dark cloud of dread that I would find a way to forget this piece threatened to eat me alive. I couldn't remember anything else. What made me think I could remember this?

I tried to shove the fear away, knowing that if I focused on a poor outcome, of course I would produce a poor performance. I ran it through mentally a couple times with nary a pause. I knew this piece. I knew this piece.

Thirty seconds into performing it, I completely blanked.

I was in front of Dianne Walker, of all people. I couldn't just stop. So I jumped to the next thing I could remember -- my placeholder set of 32 counts of buck single time steps. And I camped on it for 64 counts -- nearly half the dance. I threw in the few phrases I could remember, but all I could think was I'm presenting my own choreography in front of Dianne Walker and not only am I not doing  the choreography, I'm doing beginner time steps of all things. But I smiled and eventually I remembered some other sections and managed to at least sort of land the ending.

Of course, after such a showing, the consensus of the feedback session was, 'it was simplistic.' I was frustrated, don't get me wrong. That choreography was so complicated and so intricate and I hadn't even done half of it. They hadn't even seen what the dance really was. But not one of them said, 'I could tell you forgot.' These were industry professionals, most of whom have been dancing longer than I've been alive. If anybody would have noticed, it was them.

I went back to my seat after the session and told myself, defiantly, 'I can improv. I don't need to fear memory loss anymore. I can busk.'

See, for years (literally years) I've been wanting to busk. It's both extra cash and practice. What's not to love? But the problem was despite my impressive back catalogue of choreographed tap solos, I could not manage to learn even one of them. And I wanted to have a solid forty-five minutes of solo work in my feet before I went out busking, so my dancing would be worth paying for -- even if it was only a handful of coins. But what I learned after that experience was that I could improv an entire piece in front of a crowd -- even a very knowledgeable crowd. I was completely capable of it. Memory loss could not stop me now. So what if I forgot the dance? It completely within my abilities to improv my way through and now I knew that for a FACT.

It was a powerful moment. After three years of being cut down and shrunk to nothing because of my memory loss, I finally -- finally -- had something that the memory loss could not touch. I could still dance whether my stupid memory liked it or not. I had checkmated my memory loss.

Nachmo, Day 23 - Memorising

At the moment, I have just started choreographing the final number of the show. Everything else is fully choreographed.

But the biggest news is that I have the first two and a half pieces of the show fully memorised.

I won't rehash all my psychoanalysing, read the last two posts for that. But what seems to have been the breakthrough for me so far is telling myself that memorising is not a shameful thing and I deserve to give memorising just as much time and care and attention as actually choreographing. Somehow that shifted my mindset. It was almost as if I had to give myself permission to memorise.

It's still hard, but I'm dreading it less. Now that I've fully memorised two pieces and am into a third, I have the tiniest bit of momentum on my side too. I have something to throw back at the monster within when it screams at me that I'll never be able to do this -- oh yeah? Well I already have -- twice. While that doesn't silence the monster, it does muffle it for a few minutes at least -- enough to review the choreography to reassure myself that yes, I do in fact know it.

I feel a lot better about filming this show in roughly two weeks than I did even a few days ago.

Next stop on the fear train? Contacting people about renting their venue for filming.

Nachmo, Day 16 - More Fear

So, uh... the fear didn't go away after one week. In fact, we are minutes away from closing out Week Two and I'm still just as afraid -- if not more so -- than I was before.

The fear has shifted, though. I am no longer afraid that I will not be able to finish choreographing. I am now afraid that I won't be able to learn the choreography.

On one hand, this is silly. I used to be in (read: memorise) three shows simultaneously. As soon as one would end, I'd roll in another. I have memorised entire pieces in a single afternoon multiple times. My entire Instagram page used to be basically me performing stuff I'd only memorised ten minutes earlier. There's no reason for me not to be able to do this.

But on the other hand, it's been nearly three years since I was in the middle of three simultaneous shows. I have been diagnosed with ADHD since then. I went through one of the worst periods of my personal life and am missing literally two years of memories from that time -- and because I'm only just coming out of it, a lot of conversations I have now still include the other person saying, 'don't you remember...?' Which, of course, I don't. Hearing, 'don't you remember?' multiple times every day does not exactly instill confidence in one's abilities to remember any new information.

This is silly, I tell myself. This is film. You can cut and piece together as much as you need to.

But, whispers the fear, you having to re-memorise everything right before you shoot it will waste time -- and dollars -- on set. You need to get in, shoot everything in one, maybe two takes, and get out. Your sound, light, and camera people are not going to sit around forever for free while you dilly dally about memorising stuff that you should have had memorised weeks before.

And I don't have an answer for that.

This is exactly where I'm stuck with my other dance film. Choreographing the thing is zero problem. Actually filming it with any amount of confidence is a much different story.

Your stupid sparse sound design is going to strangle you, the fear says. You're taking away the one thing that could possibly help you.

Fear doesn't like to hear that if there's little to no music, nobody will notice if I missed a phrase anyway because the music won't betray me.

But you'll know, it says. You'll know.

I'm just so tired.

I'm tired of having to fight through this voice every single minute of every single day. Memory loss is hell. I can see why depression is so high among dementia and Alzheimer's patients: memory loss -- and how people treat you when you have it -- strips away every single ounce of confidence you might have ever possessed. When you tell people you forgot, they take it personally -- 'if you really cared, you would have remembered.' And once they get that thought in their heads, there is literally nothing in the world that will ever convince them that you really did care about the thing you were supposed to remember. And then they decide that you just don't care about anything, including them, and they abandon you. There are no 'correct' words for the memory-loss patient to say that will make the other person understand that it wasn't intentional. Those words simply don't exist. So we get cut off by our friends and family, one by one. By the time the memory loss is stopped or slowed, it's too late: everybody's already gone, and they're not coming back.

And as I know all too well, the fear of abandonment is crushing.