National Choreography Month - Day 30

Finished The Gift!

It's definitely my best work so far. I wish I could see it on the stage right now.

Also, not only do I have the dance complete, I also have backdrops and lighting figured out (I may or may not have been procrastinating at the time...)

So, with all three of my planned NaChoreoMo dances done, I'm now in the process of picking my next project. I don't expect to finish it by tomorrow at 11.59 of course, but now that I've found my way back in the groove again after basically going artistically MIA for two weeks, I'd like to milk the momentum The Gift has given me for all I can. I feel like I kind of cheated myself out of NaChoreoMo during those two weeks and now I'm trying to make it up to myself. Because really, I could have accomplished so much more than just three dances but I didn't because I let Apathy Alert pysch me out for two and a half weeks.

It's kind of weird having free time, actually. I hadn't realised how much I'd been holding NaChoreoMo over my head until I finished The Gift and sat back and thought, 'so what do I do now?' So for the past two days I've been importing cassettes (White Heart's Redemption and Petra's Captured In Time & Space -- and oh, is a live album ever a nightmare to split into tracks).

I intend to start work on another dance tomorrow (or possibly later tonight). I'm a bit undecided as to which one, though. Usually I have one that jumps to the forefront of my mind and won't let go, but this time I had to scroll through my iTunes library a bit and compile a list.

It's about five songs long, but the two that really attract my attention are PFR's Them and Farrell & Farrell's Hosanna Gloria. As of this moment I think I might go with Them.

Also, for those who care about statistics...

Seven minutes forty-five seconds of music. Seven pages of notes. Fifty-four pages of choreography, at a minimum of sixty frames per page. This equals approximately 3,240 frames, since I know for a fact that there are a few pages which had more than sixty frames on them.

Note that those are the numbers for just the three dances I had originally planned on doing at the beginning of May (King Of Kings, Apathy Alert, The Gift). This does not count the rather sizeable chunk I composed for part of Kerry Livgren's Liquidity, the intro to White Heart's The Cry, or the ending sequence to Petra's Counsel Of The Holy. Take that all together and you could probably add a good minute and a half onto that first number.

Today's Commute (As Chronicled By The iPod)

Today's two-hour commute to and from dance went as follows:

(Backstory: A friend from church ended up with a second iPod car adapter he didn't need and gave it to me. I decided to put my 2 GB nano back to work (it had been kind of forgotten since my library outgrew it). I loaded it with a bunch of random songs and took it for a spin today.)

I started it off myself with The Devil Is Bad by the W's. It was the first song that caught my attention as I was scrolling through the song list and I thought, 'Hey, why not?' (It was also peppy enough to get me through the first few minutes of the drive when I'm still tired and not really alert.)

Then I set it to shuffle.

I didn't recognise the second song at first... but when I did I started laughing. The only Christmas song on the iPod (and, I had noticed after syncing, the *gasp!* only White Heart song). It seemed quite fitting as the clouds hung thick and white in the sky, heavy with glorious snow so rare.

We were off to a very good start.

Next up, the analogue recording of PFR's Name (even though the dragging is awful, I couldn't part with the analogue tracks even after getting the CD).

After that, Petra's More Power To Ya, followed immediately by Adonai.

That right there, my friends, is a good commute song. Actually it's good for pretty much anything. (Have I ever mentioned that I love this song?)

It was kind of a downer when the best rock praise song ever recorded (says me) was followed by Switchfoot's More Than Fine. Not a lot of tracks can easily follow Adonai, and that wasn't one of them.

Then came Frontlynaz's Addicted (a random hip hop song I heard once and kind of liked so I downloaded it. You know, back when I had money for that kind of frivolous stuff).

Then the iPod abruptly changed gears and put out two early Amy Grant tracks in a row -- Love Can Do and Angels (eerily appropriate for driving that highway at times).

Then it apparently tired of the '80s and moved on to R&B/Soul-type stuff (Nicole C Mullen's Witness and Mary Mary's Shackles (Praise You)).

Midway through that last track we arrived at the studio and the iPod was put on hold for several hours in favour of piano music.

Upon returning to the rattletrap and finishing the Mary Mary song, it pulled out Owl City's Fireflies, much to my sister's delight, then, as we came off the overpass onto the main highway, one of my favourite Newsboys tracks, Praises.

Following that, Fisherman Song by Boxtree -- a sweet little flashback to my childhood. Such a cute cheerful song. Stylistically it's like PFR's Great Lengths, only nobody's ever heard of it.

Then came the ultimate in modern pop (as modern pop as one gets on my iPod, anyway), the remixed version of ZOEgirl's Even If. This is definitely a song you blast from the speakers as you rock down the highway. (At least that's what I did.)

And the ultimate in BeeGee-esque late '70s rock (as far as that goes on my iPod -- see previous paragraph) Petra's Angel Of Light. It was a bit of a jump, but hey, Petra is always fitting. Always.

We pulled into Tim Horton's just as Angel Of Light finished and paused it while I went in and ordered our weekly pair of small iced capps. (Yes, non-Canadian readers, that's 'capps' with two p's. It takes less time for the weather to change around here than it does for us to say 'iced cappuccino' and we just don't have that kind of time to mess with because the hockey game starts in ten minutes and we have to hurry up and get back to home sweet igloo before the face-off.)

Anyway, the trip from Tim Horton's to the next lights followed the soundtrack to Phil Joel's Strangely Normal, and the trip from those lights to the next were underscored by PFR's Goldie's Last Day. (Is it just me or did I drive really really slowly through town? Wow. Two songs seems a bit excessive. Apologies to the people stuck behind me.)

The Newsboys' Joy carried us out of town and back onto the highway, followed by Steven Curtis Chapman's This Day and Jasmin Gibb's Come To Jesus.

As I made the left onto the gravel road to our house, the final leg of the journey, and the last note ofCome To Jesus faded into a mere echo in the short-term memory, I began to seriously hope the next song wouldn't be a dud. Years of living in the same house, taking the same road over and over and over again has taught me that from the turn onto the gravel to our house is four and a half minutes -- just enough for one more song.

What would it be? Which should I hope for?

Come on, don't pick a lame one, don't pick a lame one...

Drum beat. Drum beat. Three more, successive.

Yes. (*insert mental fist pump here* I couldn't do a real one because if I took my hand off the wheel the wind would have swept us neatly into the ditch.)


People In A Box.

Just a little bit of eighties to stick in my head for the rest of the afternoon. (Okay okay, maybe a lot of eighties to stick in my head for the rest of the afternoon.)

And then once I got in the house it was too quiet so I put on some DeGarmo & Key. So much for that other plan.



(Yes, I know I need a life.)

Refreshed

Tonight I was feeling empty.

I wanted, in that just-get-started-and-once-you-get-going-it'll-be-fun way, to do some choreography, but I wasn't really feeling it.

I felt completely lifeless inside. Like there was no emotion, no soul, nothing.

Is that not the most frightening feeling in the world? That there is this moment to seize and to enjoy and to make the most of because you will never have this moment again, and you just don't care, however much you want to?

With some reluctance, I brought up the iTunes window (it never even gets closed anymore) and began to scroll rather halfheartedly through the album artwork, waiting for something to catch my attention.

What song could possibly wake me up, clear my head, snap me out of this funk?

Then I remembered a post the Kid In The Front Row made the other day, asking music-type questions of the readership (he does it a lot -- gets the readers involved, listens to their opinions. I like that). Naturally, I gave a lot of thought to it before putting in my two cents and letting the snapshot of my musical tastes of the moment be taken.

One of the questions was something along the lines of What song brightens your day when you're down? or something to that effect.

I had answered with Farrell & Farrell's People In A Box (because, let's face it, that song is so charmingly dated it can't help but make you smile). I had also mentioned Petra's Adonai.

Well... I hadn't heard People In A Box in a couple of weeks. I scrolled to it and began to play.

Then I thought, heck, why not listen to the other Farrell & Farrell song I have? And the one that Bob Farrell wrote with DeGarmo & Key that I've really been liking lately?

So I listened to the other two as well.

Hosanna Gloria and Let The Whole World Sing.

(If you liked Adonai, you will totally love these two. Unfortunately, the latter is not to be had on the iTunes Store and is only available on YouTube as a part of a live medley.)

Both are beautiful songs. The message and the passion with which it's presented smoothed out my paranoia to the point of invisibility and totally relaxed me. God is great, He is glorious, He is worthy to be praised. There is nothing to fear.

I can now tell you first-hand if you are a Christian artist and you are striving to glorify God in all you do, then your work is not in vain. It can uplift a fellow brother or sister when they need it, showing them that God is still in control, and He is still glorious. Keep singing, keep writing, keep dancing for the glory of God. He can use it even twenty-five years later in a little bedroom in rural Alberta at one in the morning to remind a frightened lagging spirit that God is still there for them to praise.

And now I'm listening to Newsboys -- Presence (My Heart's Desire); He Reigns; You Are My King (Amazing Love); and Take My Hands (Praises).


All of my life
I looked for the reason You created me
Now I realise I was given just
To sing a song of praise to Thee...

-- DeGarmo & Key, Let The Whole World Sing
(from Mission Of Mercy, Power Discs, 1983)