So someone asked me the other day if I am excited to be choreographing? I looked at them and said, “Honestly, I’m terrified!” And that’s the truth. Don’t get me wrong I am super excited, but I think terrified better explains how I feel. This is going to be a new experience for me and it is something that I know I will grow so much from. Also, in the end I know that I won’t regret it and probably want to do it again.
Over this past summer I spent a lot of time trying to find inspiration or some idea that I would just love to dance about, but when that never came I decided to just throw in the towel. Then at the last minute, actually two days before it was due, I was sitting in an anthropology lecture and bam it hit me! I had my idea and I began to discover what story I wanted to tell. Being the nerd that I am, I decided that my dance will be based off of the real story of human evolution, a monkeys to man kind of tale. It will be about everything including our closest ancestors, natural selection, discovering “Lucy”, man coming out of Africa, the features that define us from apes, and maybe even some knuckle walking. For choreographing, I like to draw movement ideas from all kinds of places, and recently I’ve been watching a lot of videos on primitive tribes and the great apes, especially chimpanzees! I also like to ‘play games’ and work collaboratively with my dancers to create movement sequences out of nothing. So in the end I’m planning on this piece being a big hodge-podge of movement that randomly assembles into the story of how humans came to be. Mainly, I look forward to making this a fun process for both me and all the dancers in my piece!
Photo: Prem Ananda
