There have been times, I am sure, when you have been practicing at home, trying to remember some moves you learned in class, or working on transitions, or wondering which movements go with the music you are listening to. Things that seemed obvious in class as the music played, now seem vague and harder to remember. Sometimes it helps to have a tool to help you remember things and accelerate the learning curve!
As young as 3 or 4, most children learn the alphabet, not by being taught one letter at a time, but by learning the famous alphabet chant: a-b-c-d-e-f-g-.... Stringing the alphabet together in a chant turns out to be not only a useful teaching tool, but a useful reference tool later (who has not chanted part of it mentally when looking something up in the dictionary?) By tying the letters to a song, the whole thing becomes easier to remember. I'm sure you also have many favorite songs to which you know the lyrics- and often the tune is hard to remember without the lyrics, and vice versa. The interdependent structure of words and music make both easier to remember. In the same way, one of the best tools we have for teaching dance is choreography. It can serve as the structured exercise that makes the movements easier to remember. In dance, the movement vocabulary is the ABC's, combinations are like phrases, combinations in patterns to the music are like sentences, multiple combinations and patterns transitioning into each other are like paragraphs, and a whole choreo could be a whole story!
A well constructed choreography can be a repository of lots of information that can be useful on many levels: instruction, reference, practice, example, to name the obvious. For starters, the choreo gives you a catalog of the movements themselves- in some cases, a large part of the movement vocabulary can be included in one dance.
A choreo will use movements in combinations (ex: drop, drop, right, right), and those combinations can be used in patterns (combination right, then combination left). Combination patterns may be sequenced in various ways to expand the vocabulary further. This is particularly useful for beginning students, who usually do not yet have the facility with the movements to compose combinations but wish to practice them. Movements and combinations that appear in choreos can then be added to your vocabulary.
In a good choreo, the movement combinations are already sequenced into natural transitions which, when practiced, allow the body to become familiar with the natural flow of the movements into each other. When repeated often enough, they become second nature so that when you need such transitions for you own choreographies or improvisation, your dancing will have the fluidity that is a hallmark of this dance form. A choreo often also includes layering, or doing more than one movement at once, giving you the opportunity to practice these more advanced techniques.
None of this is, of course, done in a void: all is done in sync with the music, and while you are learning the choreo you are hearing the music repeatedly. After a while, you will notice cues in the music that match certain movements, and you will feel how the rhythm is synchronizing with your movements. Patterns of movement that match patterns in the music become more obvious as the choreo is better known. The more you repeat the dance, the more you can listen for those musical cues to time your movements exactly with the music, including those emphatic movements or pauses that act like punctuation. Add some expressiveness and you are now interpreting the music!
Most choreos also move about, therefore incorporating a number of traveling moves. Once you have memorized the choreo and can concentrate on dancing it, you have to start thinking about your audience. How can you use the choreo's traveling steps to move yourself around the stage/ audience/ restaurant? You can begin to develop your stage presence by imagining various audiences. Later on, you will do this with all your own choreos as well, but using someone else's as a tool is just fine!
Learning choreos to different kinds of music can be a very efficient way of learning what kinds of movements match what kinds of music. Later on, when you're doing your own choreos or working on improvising to a certain type of music, you can go back to the choreos you know to similar music to reference the movements. Of course, the better the choreography, the more you can get out of it, so it is wise to choose to learn the choreographies of reputable instructors with good technique. When a choreography is really well designed, it will feel like it is the best possible interpretation of that music, which also makes it easier to remember!
Can you learn to dance without ever memorizing a choreo? Certainly you can. But you will learn faster by using as many tools as possible, and learning choreography is one very valuable tool!
Yours in dance,
Karima Nadira