Nachmo is harder than NaNoWriMo because in Nachmo there's no specific end goal. NaNoWriMo has 50k, Nachmo has... 'the experience.' Which is all well and good, but 'experience' doesn't necessarily encourage one to slog through the tough bits to a quantifiable accomplishment. In years past I would attempt to choreograph a certain number of songs or number of minutes, but choreographing is a lot more fluid than writing. There's no specific unit of measurement. Writing has individual words, dance has... pliés? steps? pointed feet? How do you measure a dance? Time is the closest you get, and even then, time is better for measuring the finished product. Thirty seconds of a solo can take an hour or so to choreograph. But the same thirty seconds for a group of twelve can take several eight-hour days.
All that to say, I don't have a monthly goal. I would like to finish three pieces, but that's not as hard and fast as my daily goals. So far, those have mostly looked like 'choreograph first verse/third chorus/bridge.' Choreographing chunks that size seems to be large enough to trigger some adrenaline, but it still doable, and it moves the piece along at a good pace so it feels like I'm making progress.
I'm keeping the same schedule as I did during NaNoWriMo -- work out a couple phrases over breakfast before work, then do another couple of eight counts during my lunch break. This usually gets me pretty close to my daily goal, and it's a great way to 1. make better use of time that would otherwise be spent scrolling Facebook, and 2. fit my dreams into the nooks and crannies of my life, since it appears I may never again have whole blocks of uninterrupted time to myself.
I've finished one piece so far, and I'm approaching the halfway point of the second one. For both of them, I've found myself choreographing the end before the beginning or at least before the middle. It currently feels like that's helping me with my structure and pacing (whether that's how it actually looks on stage remains to be seen).
I'm starting to focus a lot more on making a cohesive structure with themes, motifs, and more intentional dynamics, and while it makes my brain hurt sometimes and leaves me more vulnerable to self-doubt (and therefore self-loathing), I also recognise that I need to focus on that if I want to make something that 1. draws the viewer in, and 2. is satisfying. It's the next step for leveling up, according to the online choreography classes I took last year. It's difficult because I loathe repetitive music and dance with such a fiery and unrelenting passion that I have taken my work to the opposite extreme and ANY repetition of any kind in my work is used for target practice. I HATE repetition, so repeating motifs in my work feels like the antithesis of everything I've ever stood for as an artist and it sometimes make me feel like I'm unoriginal and lazy and that I write boring choreography (and therefore I'm a failure), even though I can think of many great examples where a tiny bit of repeated melody makes the song stronger and the soul happy. I guess my difficulty right now is in figuring out which bits should be repeated, and how many times they should be repeated. No surprise, given how much I've avoided it thus far in almost ten years of choreographing.
At least at this point in my life, I'm at least slightly familiar with the concept of giving myself grace to learn and try new things and maybe even fail a little bit at them at first. This was NOT in my vocabulary when I graduated college two years ago, but it's here now and it's serving me well.
I am proud of how much I've accomplished so far this month and I hope that the lessons I'm learning are strengthening my work, especially as I continue forward into my goal of creating full-length shows.
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