Recent PDC Comp Assignment

Liz Lerman's "Little Red Riding Hood" Composition Exercise.

Liz Lerman was in Dance Spirit Magazine article "Eight modern choreographers you should know"  February 1, 2008
Quote from the article from Liz: 

 Advice for young choreographers: "You need dance skills but you also need to nurture creativity in others, to learn to bring out the best in them. Figure out what it is you want to say and think about how to say those things through dancing. If there’s something bothering you in the world, at school or with your family or friends, go make a dance about it!" 

Choreographing to words:
It can become trite if a dance is choreographed to every single word of a song, but abstraction and variation can help with this.  Usually it is advised that begining choreographers do not choreograph to a song with lyrics in it because they will follow the words instead of creative choices, their theme and motif, and choreographic devices.
A good fun example of movement made to fit words is the Napoleon dance by Nederlands Dans Theatre.

Our Adapted Liz Lerman Process:
1) Every person makes one movement gesture for each word in the first 2-3 lines of the story "Little Red Riding Hood".  Time is short to prevent second guessing and quick brain work.
2) They connect each movement "word" together to make one larger phrase
3) Everyone is put in a duet with one student choreographer per duet
4) The student choreographer puts the two individual solos together to make one cohesive duet, by exaggerating, deleting, manipulating, adding, repeating, skipping, etc. the given movement.  The choreographer is in charge of the new duet, not the dancers, and gets to do what he/she will with the given movement from the solos. It may end up looking very different from the original solos. 
5) We presented these with randomly picket music without the story being read.


Obviously this is a work-in-process, but I am very proud of these dancers for working hard and taking it seriously.  This can be an advanced composition exercise.  It really helps dancers "see" possibilities in choreography.  You become better at choreographing by practicing choreographing. 

Here are their short works: