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Learning to choreograph
Hi Leon -- What a great question! It sounds like you are what we call a "quick study" at dance. That is, you naturally learn and remember dance moves and sequences very easily. (If you can learn easily off a video this is especially telling of a deep aptitude for absorbing moves! -- as for many dancers this process is quite frustrating since everything is reversed.) So first of all, give yourself a big pat on the back; many dancers (included countless professionals) will always have to struggle to achieve what comes very quickly and naturally to you. Also, learning material quickly and well is a skill that may be very important to your career should you enter the professional dance realm in the future. It's absolutely essential at auditions, where you could be competing against dozens or even hundreds of trained and talented dancers. A choreographer or director will look twice at someone who "gets" the movement faster than anyone else -- it could mean you have a natural affinity for their type of choreography, and/or that they will have to spend less rehearsal time teaching the material: both very good things for directors in the time- and money-pressured world of dance! Incidentally, you will see that many of the top choreographers employ someone called a "rehearsal director" -- these are typically dancers that have a deep physical understanding of that choreographer's material, and learn and retain it so well that they are entrusted to teach it to the company. A very well-known choreographer I know typically develops his core material for a piece by improvising in a studio with his rehearsal director: he executes a movement phrase, she 'sees' it so well that first time(!) that she takes it in and, essentially, teaches it back to him until they have it honed. When they have enough phrases, she is the one who goes back and teaches the material to the company. A few weeks later the choreographer can come in and 'paint' with the sequences that his dancers have already learned. That's a lot of trust! Not to mention a lot of talent. This leads me to my next point, which is actually one that is often missed, I find, in dance departments and institutions most everywhere: not everyone in the dance world needs to be good at everything. If you are a good dancer, there is absolutely no reason to presume you will be a good choreographer: that's like assuming that every actor will also direct films. You might be a dancer or a choreographer or a dance teacher or a rehearsal director (or any of the numerous other dance careers that exist: see my list in my reply to Job prospects for dance majors in Recent Questions), or you might be someone who does one or two or several of these things -- but be aware that each one requires very different skills and aptitudes. At this early stage however it is exactly right to be experimenting and experiencing all that interests you in dance. Just make sure you have fun doing it, and give yourself room to be new at something and not necessarily an expert yet. It might be that you are a little hard on yourself when it comes to choreographing, precisely because you are used to things coming very easily to you. Give yourself a break. Just because inventing movement isn't coming as 'naturally' to you as learning movement, doesn't mean that you won't eventually become quite skilled in it somewhere down the line. Some tips: like other things, choreography is a skill you can learn. Courses abound in college dance departments and other dance institutions. It might be harder to find instruction in choreography as a teenager, but check your local resources: frequently, community dance projects might include a creative/choreographic emphasis, or perhaps you can take a class at a local community college. Also: if you don't have one, buy or rent or borrow a video camera. Almost every choreographer I know uses one, because, as you have learned already, one can improvise all the terrific stuff in the world, but it is VERY difficult to remember it kinetically (ie., simply with your body) and without a visual record of what you just did. Try setting up a camera in a fixed wide shot, put on different types of music, and improvise. When you play back the tape, mute the sound and see which movement sequences arrest your eye. Those are the ones you want to retain and use somehow. And since you are good at learning from video, that part should be a snap for you! Good luck Leon! -- Nicole
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