Choreography for Dance and Life

TWICE A WEEK I meet to teach the art of choreography to a small group of mature, interested (for now), and interesting students. For me, a self-professed dance geek, being able to watch and analyze dance while searching for meaning and breaking down the craft with college students is one of the great pleasures of my life.

While the art of making dances becomes more and more marginalized with the help of TV jargon, it seems a cause to stand up for before the art itself disappears. New York Times dance writer, Gia Kourlas, recently stated in an article entitled Time to Put Choreography Back on its Feet that “Choreography may be the last loaded term in dance—a little musty, a bit Doris Humphrey around the edges—but it shouldn’t be cast aside. It moves beyond dance and performance to represent the most expansive way to think. It’s time to reclaim the word before someone else gets a hold of it. It stands for too much.”

Funny coincidence that this year, in lieu of a text book, I have decided to use excerpts from books on choreography, many of them taken from this said ‘musty’ book by Doris Humphrey called The Art of Making Dances published in 1958. This work still holds true to be a treaty of dance making with Humphrey’s unflappable resolve on the fundamentals of choreography where she makes various statements akin to the Bill of Rights for dance makers. Such as, “Two dimensional design is lifeless. Monotony is fatal: look for contrasts; Listen to qualified advice, don’t be arrogant,” and “A good ending is forty percent of the dance”—plus other gems.

One of Doris Humphrey’s most popular dances was titled “Exits and Entrances,” a comment on a larger life scale. It recently sprang to mind as one of my favorite dance titles as I was on a long drive where I would experience one of the most profound moments in a parent’s life (as my husband and I brought our ninth grader to begin her high school years away from home at a boarding school close to the Mason Dixon Line).

As the miles rolled by measuring what would become the physical distance between my first-born and me, I recalled my own “Exits and Entrances” and realized how it was essentially these two repeated experiences that have given my life the most meaning. In this case, my daughter’s exit from home—complete with a Greek chorus of crying sisters—was only sweetened by her elated entrance onto the new campus and temporary home where, with open arms and a really beautiful smile, she dove into this premature departure (exit).

We can choreograph a dance as we choreograph a life, making choices—as painful or ecstatic as they may be—along the way that will give life more meaning. We consider space, time, and energy to express a life that is a constant work in progress and which in the end stands as a completed body of work with the necessary action of exits and entrances.

I just can’t wait for my daughter’s next “entrance” which will come with a new intention and purpose, different from the ones before it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 16th, 2010 at 2:43 pm and is filed under Dance, Eliza’s Musings, Insight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.