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 29 - Pressure

I’ve officially booked a filming venue.

We shoot on 6 February at stupid early o’clock.

I have so much memorising to do.

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.

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...