NEW BEGINNING…..

OK, so in my previous post I decided to keep working on Kill of the Night, but to use the creation of this performance to blog my journey start to finish – good, bad, and everything in between!  Why you wonder?

a.  it’s an awesome way for me to consciously think about how I create, see where where I stumble, hit road blocks, and what jump starts the creative juices and ideas.

b.  maybe by blogging my creative journey, maybe it will either:  help others to begin or keep going when the going gets rough OR share a few lessons from my stumbles, twists, and turns.

Yeah, that!  Well…not always…but definitely sometimes!  So….the plan.

Blind and Frozen by Beast in Black, to perform Friday the 13th of July.  Gives me just about 6 weeks to create.  I do admit that many choreographers create faster, some seem to create truly incredible acts week after week.  For this one, I wanted to give myself extra time to:

• truly bring my creative vision to life – no pressure inducing deadlines
• take time along the way to blog the process
• I’m hoping to add some things in that I haven’t done before – need extra time to work that out too
• and last but not least – I’d like to completely wrap it up 1 week before the first practice…so that gives me about 5 weeks.

So what song am I going to do?  I’ll share it in a minute, I promise!  I am almost always inspired to create after hearing a song…even if I’ve heard it before, sometimes it just clicks in place.  I also have a list of songs I’d like to create a performance for, and sometimes revisit those.  Maybe one jumps out, maybe one doesn’t.  What almost never works for me?  Picking a song just because it fits a theme.

So, as I promised myself in my last Kill of the Night post, I’m going to create a plan and a timeline this time – goal posts to make sure I’m staying on target, but have a little bit of wiggle room too when I need it.

ROUGH OUTLINE:

• choose the music
• buy or download the music, and edit it if needed
• write up an outline for the dance, background, the story, ideas, feelings, how many dancers, etc.
• pick a costume, or something similar to what will be my costume
• listen to music for dance and change ideas
• choose animations
• work on choreography and record
• build set
• finalize costumes
• create style cards for dancers
• plan out movers and create routes
• test and adjust movers and choreography
• add effects
• test and adjust
• pack up set
• test again 🙂
• make any final adjustments
• take copy of set and movers into inventory

I probably won’t do everything in this exact order, but it’s pretty much the flow I follow.  I find that for women, animations look different depending on the costume, so I like to wear something close to what I envision for the final costume.  Sets and costumes can sometimes be a real challenge for me…so hoping I can keep the inspiration going and not get stuck!

Tomorrow I’ll add some “checkpoint” dates to this list and start marking it off.

So…the song I picked, which I will edit.  I’m hoping I can smoothly cut out the guitar solo.  Doesn’t quite fit for me, and I’d like the dance to be under five minutes.  Here it is!  More on why I chose it in the next post.

Happy dancing!