The Dance Routine Corner
Learning to dance? This site will help you with advice on learning dance routines and new choreographies.
With you on your journey to becoming a great dancer.
Help!
Common problems and topics covered when it comes to learning a dance routine, new steps and performing.
How Do You Make Choreography?
Choreography can refer to 1 routine to 1 song. Dance routines are choreography however what we're dealing with on this page are multiple routines or pieces (performances).
Your goal may be to create a choreography piece that you can show to others or on a stage.
So how does choreography come about? Well first of all you need to be able to create routines - that comes first. But how do you put different routines together?
You will usually need a theme or a story in order to combine different routines together. This way you can see where it would be most appropriate to put each routine.
Some routines flow into each other much better than others. It's up to you to get this order correct so that the piece is easy to watch rather than disjointed.
When creating choreography you also need to bear in mind how many dancers are performing and what they are doing at each stage. All the dancers may not be involved in every routine, you may want to alter them around.
You will need to know who your best dancers are in each routine. You will then need to decide what the other dancers who aren't doing the routine will be doing. Whether they'll be doing something else completely or off stage.
When creating choreography another consideration you have is how to space the dancers apart and their positioning. Do you want them close together or far apart? In 1 line or 3 lines?
And you also need to bear in mind things such as transitions - how the dancers will move from one routine to another, or even within the same routine.
There may be group bits in the choreography which can only be practised when everyone is present, for example with cannons (one person does something, then the next, and the next, etc, etc).
All of these things you will need to think about so that when you have all the dancers with you, you can get to work straight away and so that they are sure of what they should be doing at any point.
Every dancer needs to be taken care of, whether it's simply that they have to be on stage or off stage, stage left or stage right.