Dance - Choreography Class Clips

Choreography is a combination of things. Musical interpretation -

if there's something in the music, maybe a drum roll or something,

you try to relate the choreography to that. Or maybe there's a build up and they'll do a standing spin.

It encourages the audience to applaud. Touch the audience - that's what it's about.

Your job is to touch the audience.

-Dynamics - quicks and slows, highs and lows.

-Yes.

These all go towards making great choreography.

And also I imagine it's about, "Oh, they're good with their hands." Real strengths and weaknesses.

-"That will highlight my partner."

-Right. Day one - you scan your celebrity.

With Mark Ramprakash I just said, "Stand on one leg, spin around."

Ker-ching! He did it! "Everything I choreograph now, he's spinning!"

Let's talk about Ali and Brian's rumba. Talk to me from a choreography point of view.

The step I've chosen here is a step we see in our field very often.

It's great. She elevates now.

-See the toe on the floor?

-Yeah.

It would have taken a split second to come a centimetre off the floor, Len would class that as a lift,

they would have lost points. What I was so amazed by was they've already got such a trust.

There's such control in her body that she kept that toe on the floor.

Not only that. She then devlappes right the way across Brian and they keep great balance.

And again...spin. Spin is really important in dance.

It creates a dynamic. Then leaning across into a low-level position.

-You said this was really clever. Why?

-This two were slated,

but look at that step there. Very clever. Joe took her full weight.

She's on her side. If he even slightly falls, they're both on the floor together,

if he'd got that even slightly wrong.

-He's got to take full weight in his arms and she'll ballet walk. Very difficult.

-Let's have a slo-mo

so that you can totally explain.

-That's him just being strong?

-He's got to collect her there.

She's only on her little toes as she's going round.

He has to take full weight.

Let's talk about Chris and Ola's tango, which I love.

-What was great about this? The music was brilliant - ZZ Top.

-Great.

I love their relationship. Kick, ball, change. And this bit.

Drop, up. This is the dynamics I'm talking about.

Generally in a tango, people just plod across the floor. Boring.

Dynamics. Highs and lows. Kick, ball, change is a very quick action. Quicks and slows.

Very quick action. Then a high point, dropping down and up again makes an effect.

I never heard the word choreography until I came from the west coast to New York,

that big city.

And then I realised it wasn't just a matter of making up dances,

it was comparable to the composing of music,

only instead of using sound, you use the human body

and you use space as a very definite and... necessary factor.

Martha Graham is as fundamental to modern dance as point shoes are to ballet.

As young dancers, we all study her technique. She devised a new language for movement

and used it to create works that changed the face of dance forever.

Contract. Beautiful.

She's compared to Picasso, Stravinsky, Einstein and Freud. What is it? What did she discover?

She'd say, "I didn't discover anything. I rediscovered what the body can do."

She took the natural movement of the body

and theatricalised it.

Martha came along and said things like, "Imagine you have an eye in the middle of your forehead

"or ears pricked like animals. And imagine if you contract

"and then release, it should be as if you could break a rock with your chest."

PIANO ACCOMPANIMENT

Martha was struggling with the idea of the individual, in society and as an artist,

and in coming to grips with how to define herself and her way of moving that was her.

She was looking for the profoundly human that she could touch and that she could describe.

The physical language which began quite simply

with the idea of trying to find a basic body language

and not interested in the foot-busy language of ballet or anything decorative,

but feeling that the torso was the seat of emotional responses.

She developed a vocabulary of movement that was based on a centre in the pelvis,

movement that originated in the solar plexus and moved out to the limbs.

And one...two...

A technique built on a breath phrase. You think of the inhalation and exhalation of the body

and then she built that into the musculature contracting, releasing and expanding.

And one... Great. Inside the body. Deeper.

Press up into the arc.

Contract.

She wanted to create a form that was not like European dance,

that was American in something about its energy, its freshness, its power.

She commissioned her contemporaries, Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber,

and Chavez, and the great composers who, in retrospect we say were the geniuses of the 20th century,

but at the time they were all young, starving artists together.

Appalachian Spring is a triumph of American creative talent -

Martha's choreography, music by Copland and design by Isamu Noguchi

created a landmark work in a new art form - modern dance.

In this film, Martha, aged 64, gives a moving performance in the role of the young frontier bride.

Most importantly, Martha wanted to create dances so that she could perform.

She didn't sit down to think about creating a technique. It all came out of the work that she choreographed.

As her vocabulary developed, the body was full of contradictions and emotional upheaval.

It was a body language that became very suited to the subject matter

of...of heroines

in...in mental torment.

I think she wanted to deal with subjects that were timeless and that everybody could relate to

however disguised they were as myth.

That these feelings of jealousy and rage and complexities of emotion were visible to everyone.

We've asked two very distinctive choreographers - Wayne McGregor and David Bintley -

to give us an insight into their working methods and the modern language of dance.

David, who's Artistic Director of Birmingham Royal Ballet, developed out of the classical tradition,

drawing inspiration from the techniques of ballet.

Wayne's work could hardly be more of a contrast. His choreography grows out of his own body

and the way it moves - angular, disjointed, fluid and fierce.

We've set them a challenge to create a brand new dance.

I've given them as a starting point the first preserved example of the written alphabet,

etched onto an Athenian wine jug in about 740BC.

It says, "Whoever of all the dancers performs most nimbly shall win this jug as a prize."

And even more amazing that one of the first things ever written about was dance, the art with no words.

Wayne sets about the task in a surprisingly literal way.

He's partnered me with Thomas Edur and wants to create a dance

inspired by the unusual shapes of the Greek letters.

The elbow does a U. And your head does a U.

So elbow, head. 'I started in a simple way today.

'I've taken that text and looked at it as geometry, as graphic information.'

Are you doing any of this?

Yes. I'd done this one.

-You have. Yeah, yeah, you have.

-You just go like this.

I try not to do things that are predictable in movement.

That's not a conscious decision. It's the way it comes out.

I'm very interested in how you can actually reinvent physicality,

so it doesn't follow its natural point of conclusion or end route.

I'm trying to find a way of moving that's always in dislocation, fighting with itself.

I like the tension and conflict.

An elbow is the top of the circle, the top of the 8 there.

Then I change my mind and do another one, come out and describe straight away a circle.

Got my zig-zag.

I really try and move with the body so they're pushed to their physical limits.

There's something exciting about extremity. If you push the body beyond its normal capacity,

again it tells you something, teaches you something about physicality

that you've not seen before.

People like to go to the theatre to see things that are unusual, that take them somewhere.

Hopefully, what my work does and what the physical language does

is take people to a different place that they've not experienced before.

David's initial inspiration for the duet came from one particular piece of music

-which he has wanted to choreograph for years.

-'The first thing that came to my mind, really,

'was an idea that had been lurking for a while. Satie's Gymnopedies.'

And I once heard that Gymnopedies,

as Satie intended it to be, was...

..Greek wrestling.

I always thought it would be fun to do this very famous piece and do it as Greek wrestling.

And then I started thinking about Deborah and Alessandro,

and what that would mean as a metaphor. Obviously, I just didn't want to choreograph wrestling.

And then I got this other idea that sex was quite important to the Greeks.

So there's a whole lot of stuff that I came with about male/female relationships.

I want it to have all these elements in. I want it to look like a dance at some point.

At some point I want it to look like wrestling, at other times like love-making.

I never want to lose this archaic kind of sculptural quality.

'It doesn't have a discernible shape. There are peaks, there are troughs.

'It has moments of flurries and then moments where it calms down.

'I think that's the same with an argument, the same with a fight.'

Good. OK, so... then just show me...how you're preparing for that first move.

Siobhan Davies is one of Britain's leading choreographers of modern dance.

The works she's created have won a clutch of prestigious awards.

The one thing a dancer has is this. That's it.

And whatever history of experience you have within this.

When you first started playing around with your own choreography,

do you think you were simply doing that thing of merely elaborating on ways you like to move yourself?

Were you just making movement that sat naturally on your body, that was about who you were

-and what you wanted to be like?

-I don't think I was aware of it at the time,

but if I think about the early pieces,

they all tried to use movement I hadn't done before.

There was a piece I made called Sphinx.

And I was normally in the pieces because I thought that would be a way of exploring movement anyhow.

It would also mean that I could go into a little corner of the studio

while other people were working.

And I remember thinking about Sphinx. What is it that I can get to move

that will totally change the vocabulary?

And I thought of animals

and I went on all fours.

And the moment you go on all fours,

your spine, chest, stomach, how your legs sit into your hips,

and how your arms come out of your shoulders

is enormously different.

So in a very innocent way I tried to explore all of those things

and then tilt the body back up and stand,

but try to keep that image, that knowledge about the spine,

how the arms and legs hang from the body, how the stomach is different, how the tailbone feels different.

And see if I could imprint that back through movement.

The dances that you create have no narrative and no programme.

What is it they are saying to us?

They're not saying, in that sense, anything. We are presenting...movement.

In various ways, different kinds of movement.

To which anyone can look if they're interested and can bring

whatever kind of attention or thing to that that each individual thinks,

rather than it being my telling them how to think.

-So we are free to read meaning in them if we choose?

-Exactly. Oh, yes.

But is there any meaning in them that you've imparted to them?

Nothing, I would say, other than the meaning of movement itself,

what movement is in life, in anybody's life.

-Nothing of you yourself?

-Yes, since I make the movement, then it's me. That I would agree to.

But it's also that in giving it to the dancers, to the dancers in my company,

I want them... I want the movement to be the way they would do it, individually,

rather than just something I have given to them.

Your dances are not choreographed to music.

The music habitually arrives when the choreography is completed.

Why is that?

Well, there are probably a number of reasons, but the principal point about it is

to allow an independence of the elements involved, in this case the dance and the music,

so that the music does not have to support the dance,

nor does the dance have to reflect the music. But each can be what it is in this circumstance

and the circumstance is that they both take place in the same time and place.

They lend something to each other in that time and space?

I think so. I hope so! I think that between the two they can produce something else,

something that I myself wouldn't have thought of,

nor if the music had been made for the dance, it would not have come out this way,

so in that way we make a discovery.

Have you a pretty good idea, though, what the music is going to be like before the performance of it?

No, not necessarily.

Sometimes the particular composer will tell me something

and I'm always willing to listen.

If the composer wants to see the dance, that's fine, too.

But more often than not, I don't know the exact nature of the sound

except there is, I think, between the composer and myself, I trust,

a sense of good faith that we will, in that way, come out with something that is interesting.

Within the total structures that you create,

you sometimes leave the arrangement of sequences entirely to chance,

tossing a coin to decide who does what next. What's the reason for that procedure?

It is an idea that comes... Well, actually, it's an idea that comes from many things,

but perhaps principally the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes,

where you can cast your fortune or ask a question

and what you get is an answer that is suitable, so to speak, for that moment in time and space.

Well, I thought that dancing occurs in time and space

and it would be interesting to see rather than my making the decision as to what follows what

but by using the I Ching in terms of continuity to discover something else,

that is that you could see that there could be a different result from moment to moment,

rather than something that one had set up in advance.

In that sense, it's like process, it's like continuing.

For you, you've said that dance is always about dance and nothing else.

How did you arrive at this simple determining idea?

Well, I think dancing is, to put it from my point of view, movement in time and space.

I don't think it needs anything else.

That is, we don't need necessarily music to walk about.

We do that just by the nature of that being the way we operate and move.

And I also think that...

I thought that movement doesn't have to have a meaning.

I understand it can convey things, but you have to set up something ahead of time to let someone know

that that's what it's conveying.

In my case, I wanted it to be a surprise.

So rather than it meaning something, it could be what it was as you saw it as it continues to go along.

MUSIC: "The Nutcracker" by Tchaikovsky

If you like theatre, if you like the movies, then you'll probably like this work.

You'll probably enjoy it and you'll realise after a while

that you can get it

and it doesn't matter that some people haven't spoken for the last 20 minutes or whatever it is

and you realise, "They haven't said anything, but I'm following a story."

And it's set in a world that people understand. It looks like a play.

It hasn't got tutus or it hasn't got dance-friendly costumes necessarily.

They're adapted or whatever. It looks like the real world.

And the performers look like real people.

I've learnt over the years

to try and find something in people that I think I can bring out

and develop into people eventually who can give great acting performances through their dancing.

Don't go near her. Let her prise you together...

'I do get a lot from that.

'But I do love the work and I love being part of a family that creates work.'

I think the shoulders was better.

Matthew's very, very specific and very clear about the images

and the idea and the characters

which frees you up so much when you're improvising material

because you've got a very clear framework to work in.

Matthew's good at eliciting the right kind of material from people

because he gives information and he'll bring in books and films and videos and magazines and photos,

so you've got a feel for the world that he's trying to create.

I think most choreographers would say that their reason for being a choreographer is movement.

Movement invention.

And most choreographers' work is about that.

It's an excuse for movement invention.

Even sometimes if they are telling us a story of sorts, it's just something to hang the movement on.

Movement always lends itself to where the story is going.

That's what's important. Not what the movement looks like.

It's whether or not the movement is telling a story.

And I suppose that's what makes him different.

The second half takes us to...the Kingdom of the Sweets it's usually called - we call it Sweetie Land -

where you meet all these characters that are based on various confectionery, I suppose.

You've got the Liquorice Allsort people, Marshmallow Girls, sort of yobby Gobstopper Boys. Very sticky.

We decided people in Sweetie Land are judged by how they taste, rather than how they look,

so when you meet someone, you have a taste of them. You wipe a bit off and have a little lick.

I'm not from the ballet world. I wasn't trained as a ballet dancer.

I love watching ballet,

but I don't choreograph in the classical style.

But certain passages of music in this piece are very grand

and you have to come up with a kind of grandeur which I get a little bit from ballet

and a little bit from Hollywood musicals, the Cyd Charisse kind of thing.

I do always approach these projects completely seriously and serious-minded.

I have to have the heart of the piece central to my idea to begin with

and then the humour and the satire and the wit creeps in.

But the central reason for doing it is always something very heart-felt.

That's why I think, ultimately, people really do like the pieces

because they're not just throw-away.

There is something at the heart of it which moves you as well usually.

Really go over that leg.

Jan is peeling away too early.

Created in 1981, Ghost Dances has proved to be one of Christopher Bruce's most enduring

and popular works.

In dealing with the victims of political oppression,

it demonstrates once again his sensitivity to the human condition.

Ghost Dances was created after meeting with Joan Jara,

the widow of Victor Jara who was a very famous Chilean actor,

theatre director, songwriter, singer,

all-round performer.

He was murdered in '73

when Allende was deposed and killed and Pinochet took power.

I wanted to do it very, very simply

and I didn't want to, in a sense, make grand statements.

I wanted it to be about all the little people that are caught up in that terror.

And I chose to use a very simple image of a ghost dancer.

For me, they were just spirits of death that took the people away.

And I used the idea of skeletal figures

because of those wonderful, simple, naive skeletons

that they have in Central and Southern America

where the old religions mix with Catholicism.

You have these skeletons on stalls, people buy and...

It's a kind of, as I said, a very naive and simple image.

I just decided this would be the image.

Yeah, so that it goes "drop, two, three, four, round".

That's it. Otherwise, your spacing goes.

So the idea was these people would come into the space, just rest for a moment

before passing into the underworld for a moment of reflection before going on where...

..a fragment of a life is just told.

A simple song, a simple dance, and maybe the cutting off of that life.

And don't be afraid to keep moving

because the more you move on to that leg, it's easier to get back.

GENTLE PANPIPE MUSIC

I worked with Chisato last year when we began developing this piece.

So it was this kind of a crash course for me in sign language

and in us communicating together,

so I guess it has an impact on the choreography

because there are certain things you take for granted as a hearing dancer.

When we were working together, we couldn't be dancing, then we speak and then Chisato responds to me,

so we'd have to stop and take time to explain what we were talking about,

rather than being able to do all of those things at the same time.

WHISPERING, HIGH-PITCHED SOUNDS

WHISPERING, HIGH-PITCHED SOUNDS

Here's how In The Upper Room began.

I'm working in a London studio in 1985,

just beginning to isolate a family of movement.

While ultimately none of this work will be performed barefoot,

I work without shoes in order to establish a new connection to the floor,

something which can be unique to In The Upper Room.

I begin to find a motif. I strike the floor, catch the foot and pull it far behind me.

The image in my mind is a hunter pulling his bow.

When I release, the momentum of the leg falling throws me off balance.

I must recover. This action of recovering will go on throughout the entire dance.

I transfer this motif to other dancers,

in this case, Christine Uchida and Shelley Washington of the original cast.

At this point, individual dancers add to the mix

with their own responses to my movements.

For instance, Jamie Bishton, the only member of the original cast still performing In The Upper Room.

Jamie was a gymnast and from his early athletic training,

he gained a brave attack and a big jump.

And these talents enrich the choreography for us all.

As the dancing takes form,

I begin to have a sense of the music I will need to support it.

In a way, it's almost as though I can visualise the music before I hear it.

I have been improvising to Philip Glass's music for more than 15 years

and now I know this is what I need.

There is something about Phil's music,

the way it's constantly unwinding from itself,

constantly evolving,

as though it's skeining endlessly.

So I call Phil

and I ask him to compose a score.

Now, Philip Glass is always very busy, probably booked for years,

but I say, "Look, Phil, just a little music after breakfast every day."

I know Phil is very fast and I know that I understand his music well enough

to take whatever he can give me and make it work. He agrees.

Then I begin to structure the movement.

That London improvisation session becomes the starting point for the first of nine movements.

I introduce two women, one beginning the phrase on the left leg,

and one on the right.

These dancers I see as custodians of the space

like Chinese watchdogs.

And by starting both sides of the phrase simultaneously, but on opposite sides,

the phrase will define an arena for the dance to come.

Now the men enter with the second phrase.

They dance this in a triangular formation,

the downstage man inverting the phrase,

so that the same movement is seen moving both forwards and backwards.

As the men and women perform the two phrases together,

you see forward and back, right and left,

circular and vertical, male and female,

thus making it clear that In The Upper Room is about opposing forces held in balance -

old and new, modern and classical.

One last thing about the title.

Philip Glass and I had talked many years ago

about collaborating on a Mass, but this never came to pass,

so now, as Phil was working on this score,

I was also listening to a Mahalia Jackson recording of a hymn

that modulated relentlessly upwards,

that seemed to climb so high, it pushed through the roof.

This image of an empty attic,

a place of last resort,

where one takes out one's treasures and puts them up for very special public view,

this image along with the Jackson hymn gave me the feeling of a secular Mass

and so I suggested to Phil, and he agreed,

that we use the title of this hymn for our work, In The Upper Room.

One of my aims as a choreographer is to try and help the audience's eye

in watching a piece of complex structure,

but it will be interesting in this piece to see how I might have a full visual field

in which the audience have to do some of that selection.

Maybe everything on stage isn't seen all the time, you have an almost accidental way of watching.

That's our experience all the time.

Our visual field is very full and we give attention to certain things and edit out the rest.

For this ground-breaking piece, McGregor chose an A-list of collaborators,

headed by Brit artist Julian Opie and cult composer Max Richter.

Opie's animations were created by observing a series of figures walking on a treadmill

at his studio in London's East End.

I spend a lot of time looking at people and how they move

and looking at street scenery as if it were choreographed.

I like that idea that nature and natural things out there,

if you focus yourself, you become in a certain sense a kind of passive choreographer.

You listen to birds singing and think this is symphony,

then you hear a car horn and a church bell and put them together in your mind,

so it is creating music out of these things.

You can do the same looking at people on the street - cue someone with a suitcase from the right,

so seeing Wayne who can play with that and make something focused and beautiful out of that is exciting.

This is the first time that Wayne and members of the Royal Opera House production team get a glimpse

of the screens that Julian's been preparing.

It's really vivid, isn't it?

I think we'll probably go for the reverse of that

-where the figure is drawn with lights and the rest is black.

-Yeah, yeah.

OK, shall we just try something? I don't know what.

Let's just see what happens.

Can you come from a parallel and can you come into it just like this?

Like that. That's it.

First day of rehearsals, eight weeks before opening night,

and Wayne starts making material for his new work.

He has the pick of the Royal Ballet's finest performers.

And back. Can you come this way?

Yeah, exactly, just a little moment, so you just go...

It's Day One. It's the beginning.

What I tend to do is have my first few weeks just getting to know the dancers.

The point of making a piece is to find something out

that's new for me about those dancers.

There's no point in doing the same old, same old.

I'm not that familiar with Ed and Marianela dancing together.

I know Ed well, but I've only made one little thing for Marianela,

so this week will be about finding physical signatures of the dancers.

But I like to be in a state of preparedness in the studio, ready to start, but not to be too fixed.

My book is empty and over the next six weeks, I'll start to fill that up.

One of the brilliant things about being a choreographer

is when you're faced with two brilliant dancers you have to invent something to do.

It's not something you can do at home, on computer or you can imagine in the car. It only happens there.

If you can be free enough to experience it in the moment, it can release something new in you.

I like to try and make at least two, three minutes of material a day, even if I get rid of most of it.

I like to push myself to do it.

I don't rehearse things.

It might be a phrase that exists in a piece, but these dancers may not do it,

so I'm not rehearsing, I'm making.

Next week, I should have a bank of material that will take me into the week afterwards.

So it's just, first of all, trying to get some basic language that we can start to find together,

what combinations of people will work together. That gives you structure.

That was a really lovely thing there when you did that last position.

You fell and then came back. It's lovely.

I'm trying to look for the maximum intensity and richness

with the fewest elements.

The ensemble is going to be my usual band,

which is a string quartet, but with an additional cello.

And also the computer, various synthesisers,

lots of bits and bobs. Toys, you might say.

I've collected a lot of shortwave radio for this piece

which has a kind of story-telling quality

because there are a lot of voices in there, but you don't know whose they are, when or where they're from.

They just float around the ionosphere, so I've hoovered them up.

And really what I'm doing is I'm sort of picking out little areas within that that I'm enjoying hearing

and trying to isolate those, trying to make some sort of musical gestures with them,

so I've got this sort of background radiation and the music is more like a foreground event

which sits on top of that.

Usually, in ballet that's been made before and rehearsed,

the stage call is the first time where they run everything, it's pretty much finished.

But with a new ballet, I won't be finished until four days before the premiere.

I'll still change my mind all through next week, but that premiere deadline comes closer and closer.

He's picking material from lots of sections of this

and we have to learn, and he's reversing everything,

so it looks different than the actual duet was before.

It might be the same step, but he's developing those steps into something else

to make a finale with everybody.

And he's trying to do everything like in a canon which is fantastic,

but it's very complicated because next Tuesday, we're on stage.

So we just hope for him to remember all the steps for next week.

MELODIC STRING MUSIC

Subtitles by Subtext for Red Bee Media Ltd 2010

Email [email protected]