Choreography in Four Phases
- Angie Never
- Sep 29
- 4 min read
I spent the weekend at the Ohio Bellydance Festival in Newark, OH, where I taught a workshop called Practice Like a Pro. I shared thinking strategies, time templates, and productivity hacks that I developed in an online practice intensive I ran for three years for dancers all over the world.
As part of the conversation, we got into a discussion about how to prepare choreography for the stage. I think of learning choreography in four phases; the number of phases you commit to has a direct correlation to the quality of your performance. I didn't have time to get into my whole theory of choreography in the workshop, so let's talk about it now.
(Note: I'll limit this discussion to what happens after the choreography has already been created. Choreography creation is a whole other roller coaster of sweat, teeth-gnashing, and magic that we'll leave for another day.)
Phase 1: Learn the choreography.
This step is pretty obvious. You go to class, and your teacher shows you the choreography beat by beat, movement by movement. Your job at this stage is to be present for the lesson, physically and mentally. Set aside the million other things you have to do, and get into your body. The more attention you can devote to it, the easier this stage becomes.
Phase 2: Memorize the choreography.
Memorizing is your responsibility and must be done on your own time. It requires an insane amount of repetition, way more than we have time for in class. I usually try for four levels of memorization.
1) You can run the whole choreography with music start to finish without stopping.
2) You can run the whole choreography without music.
3) You can start the music at any point in the song and know where you are in the dance.
4) You can run the whole choreography in your head.
Unfortunately, many dancers consider memorization the final necessary step. I get it. We're all busy doing all the things. It feels like a win just to get through a piece sometimes, but I really think the difference between being good and great lies in the next two steps.
Phase 3: Refine the choreography.
Refining a choreography means asking questions. What is the exact angle of my left arm in this part? Should I be taking three steps here or four? Is my body facing the front or the right diagonal?
You might be able to work on this while memorizing, but I think it works best to know the choreography and then tweak it. As a teacher, sometimes I need to see the students dance through the piece to know where they're struggling. You might think the hip goes up-down-up when it really goes down-up-down. If students can't do the dance without following me, I can't give them that level of attention.
Refining is especially important if you're working with a group, and it's even more important if you're working with props like swords or veils. Props are movement extenders -- they visually exaggerate the movement of the body. Unfortunately, they also visually exaggerate confusion. It takes a lot of refining to get your angles and timing right, so memorize quickly enough that you have time to clean it.
Phase 4: Inhabit the choreography.
As someone who watches a lot (a lot!) a dance shows, I beg you not to skip this step.
The best dancers you ever see may not be the most technically perfect or doing the most complicated moves. The best dancers are the ones who bring the totality of themselves to perform the piece.
To inhabit a choreography means to live in it, to dance it with every part of your body, to layer it with emotion and meaning from your own life experience. A great dancer tells three stories all at once -- the story of the music, the story of the movement, and the story of the feeling and intention behind it.
Anyone moving their body can be a dancer, and that's a special thing on its own. But the dancer who translates music into emotion is an artist.
Performance? That's not on my list.
You might have expected the final phase to be performance, but I don't care about performance all that much. Performance is 0.00001% of my life as a dancer. It's fun (and stressful, and exciting, and nerve-wracking) to show audiences what I'm working on, but it's just a snapshot of a moment.
If you're devoting your precious time to a choreography, don't stop at memorization. Take the journey through all four phases. Learn it, memorize it, refine it, and inhabit it. That last step is where the magic lives. No matter who you're performing for, the real reward is your experience with the piece, connecting to it, getting lost there. That's the kind of practice that will inspire your greatest work.
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