The Creative Process with an Injury

Photo by Afterglow Studio (https://www.afterglowstudio.co/)

The Injury

One of the things we always fear in dance is the peril of an injury – not only could this potentially end our career, but it could change our lives forever.

We have been taught to push through the pain and sickness, with no thought about the potential cost. In particular I have always tended to ignore pain or an injury until it affects my daily life as well as my dance life.

Last week I decided to bite the bullet and go to the doctor after about five days of my left knee hurting. When I went to the doctor, they let me know that they thought either that I was on the borderline of tearing my meniscus or had torn my meniscus. This was really scary to me for a variety of reasons; I had one more dance piece to complete before the Darvin Dances show and my wedding was coming up in a month. While this is not a career ending injury, it would definitely interfere in my continuous training and choreography creation.

After some tears, a pity party and some chocolate, I was able to calm down. Luckily the piece (The Choreographic Mad Lib) that I had yet to create was a structured improvisation – meaning that it would be less physically draining and wouldn’t need the extensive movement (i.e. demonstrating movement phrases for dancers to learn) during the rehearsal process.

I made a plan for completing the piece: I had to create 5 movements phrases, two resting motions for dancers to use when they were tired and two partnering movements that every dancer could easily do for both roles. This was to be done entirely in collaboration with dancers since I needed to prevent myself from further injuring my knee.

The Process of Movement Phrase Creation

Phrase 1

I created a gesture phrase that I could easily teach from a sitting position and asked each dancer to contribute a leg movement. Their decisions varied from ronde jambes (a circling of the leg), to foot articulations to finally falling to the ground. The phrase became more alive and really reflected each of the dancer’s individual movement qualities.

Phrase 2

Each dancer had to create a movement for a specific spoken phrase I gave them and we linked them together. These included the following: Lunge and push through, circle around and twist, swirl and cut, elbow and become small, reach with your foot and spiral. Surprisingly it became a floor phrase which isn’t what I had envisioned at all, but it was really interesting to see.

Phrase 3

Each dancer picked one of their favorite movements to do in general and I alternated between using transitions such as slide and spin. I loved seeing what movements the dancers picked and learned a little more about each of them (one whom I’ve worked with for 4 years).

Phrase 4

I had the dancers work together without any input from me to create a phrase from the following words: roll, spread, reach, throw, and run. As you can imagine, this is where I started to run a bit out of steam mentally. I wasn’t able to operate how I usually do which is feeling what movement I want to come next (sometimes doing the opposite to make it more dynamic) or feeling the momentum of the previous movements.

Phrase 5

I picked a color for each dancer and had them create a short movement phrase inspired by that color and then we randomly put the phrases together in an order. One dancer, Blake, wanted to challenge herself by having any color besides red (she almost always wears red in some capacity every day). Mandy was given green and she ended up creating a phrase about how money doesn’t grow on trees. All the dancers did something very creative.

What’s Next?

I’m excited for this week’s rehearsal where we will incorporate the phrases in the actual score for “The Choreographic Mad Lib” (quite literally a movement based mad lib). Keep an eye out next week for an update and learn more about the process of creating “The Choreographic Mad Lib”!