Dance: The Creative Inspiration

What comes first while making a dance?

When I create a new dance, the initial flicker of inspiration is different every time. What comes first?

• Music?

• Movements?

• Costume?

• Story?

• Style?

• Character?

• Location?

I assure you, there’s no wrong way to do this.

MUSIC FIRST

When I first started dancing as a kid, the music always produced the impetus to move and groove. (Hey, man, this was the early 70s here.) Songs I loved would come on and I couldn’t sit still. My mom’s piano playing, the radio, my parents’ classical records, later their 8-tracks and eventually our cassette tapes in mom’s big silver boombox she played to practice and teach Jazzercize.

But this wasn’t creating dances. This was pure dancing. The raw impetus to move to music in the moment.

Sure, when I played my favorite tracks on an album over and over, or when certain popular songs got broken-record airtime, an ingrained flow of movements started to circulate as my body figured out which sorts of motions felt right with the big moments in the music, or when the verse shifted into chorus. I would repeat them because I liked them. They felt right, and they expressed exactly what that part in the music meant to me.

This was the first hint of what would later become choreography.

Choreography is not The Thing that differentiates “just dancing” from “making a dance.” I create improvisational dances all the time, especially now with four brain traumas under my sweatband—ugh, I have to quit saying that like I have for the past decade. Since the end of 2022 when I took that fall down my stairs two weeks before I woke up to my house being bombarded by toxic fumes, it’s actually five, so improvisation is more imperative to me than ever.

Many of my most well-known performances have been choreographic outline with lots of improv. Memorization problems from Dain Bramage has necessitated this, but sometimes it’s a preference.

For example, when I used to belly dance in Greek and Moroccan restaurants, I rarely had more than outline, because I had to leave room for waiters carrying trays, patrons passing in and out, people wanting to talk to me, kids running around, and because I would never know which sections or rooms my audience would be sitting in at any given moment.

To me, the difference between “dancing” and “making a dance” comes with intention. It’s when I have a purpose beyond personal enjoyment of movement-in-the-moment.

Choreography is a snapshot that captures one of those moments. It’s the decision that “this move I just did to this sound at this moment feels so good that I want to do it over and over, every time I hear that phrase.”

How I Started Creating Dances

Early in elementary, my cousin started teaching me dances from the competition school where she trained. I absorbed that teaching skill like a sponge, and eventually passed down my own creations to other kids.

Then I saw Annie in the movie theater. I came home obsessed, begging my parents for the soundtrack, a lunchbox, the movie when it came out on VHS, anything! In response, my mom got the sheet music so we could sing to her piano accompaniment. Then for Christmas, Santa bestowed upon me the record of the soundtrack as well as a full-color book of the Broadway musical.

I played that record so much Mom finally had to hide it.

Correction. I played certain songs on that record over and over and over.

Occasionally, I played one song over and over and over.

Like dancers do.

(Neurodivergent hyperfixation may have also had something to do with it. Ahem. Innocent whistle.)

Naturally, my favorite song needed to be turned into an official choreography for the spring talent show, because only “Hard Knock Life” could properly express my burning outrage over a great many fifth grade travails. But this song was one of the big group numbers, so casting and rehearsals had to ensue.

The five-year-old girl I babysat was already playing Molly in my basement where we danced with scrub brushes and ice cream buckets (low-budget water pails), dressed in my dad’s old paint clothes for our “orphan rags.” I convinced some of the other neighbor girls to be orphans and Miss Hannigan.

And lo. A choreographer/director was born.

In the beginning, it always happened like this. When that one perfect song came on with just the right tempo and mood, the right combination of sounds that harmonized with the chords already vibrating within my cells, and the general flavor of lyrics to sum up what I was feeling, I had to express it through movement.

Big movement. Dramatic movement. Theatricized movement that could begin scratching surfaces to express all the things I could not speak and dared not commit to paper where somebody else might find it. The lyrics to a song might not detail my precise experience, but that didn’t matter. That’s what character creation was for. That’s what acting was for.

The emotions that the lyrics described and the rest of the music evoked—that’s what mattered. That’s what matters to this day. Music has remained the most consistent inspirational force for my whole life as a dancer.

But it’s not the only one.

For some people, it’s not even the primary one. Sometimes a certain type of physical action or a sequence of moves burns within the body, yearning to be transformed into dance.

And thus, a hunt must ensue to find the perfect song to accompany them.

MOVEMENT FIRST

In 7th grade I became a cheerleader. This was the first time that movement led the way. It was also the first time I started making choreographic notes. I had never needed to write a dance down in order to memorize it.

Back when memorization was no problem for me, the music held and cued my dance memory. It would act like a marionette, pulling the strings of my body and nudging it in the directions it needed me to go. No matter if it was a movement sequence I needed to repeat because someone had taught me a dance, or it was one I wanted to repeat because it felt right, the song would always remind me what came next.

But in cheerleading, there often wasn’t any music—except that which we made with the impact of our hands, the stomping of our feet, and our bellowing voices.

Once I started mapping out cheers and dances for multiple bodies, I needed to develop a written language. Stick figure pyramids and X diagrams for floor movement were the first notes I ever put to pen. Words for new cheers also got written down and tweaked. With that came more stick figures creating geometrical shapes with the alignment of multiple people’s limbs, as well as my fledgling language for any moves that were too hard to draw: “swivel hips RLR” or “about-face L” or “hair flip R.”

At first, these sequences were still music-led or chant-led. But as I progressed, images started bombarding me at random times, extraneously from music or cheer cadence. Pyramids and tricks, the shapes our limbs created in staggered lines, floor patterns, formation changes, peels and cascades.

Not only did I need to keep track of my teammates’ heights in these choreographies so that the shorter girls wouldn't be hidden, but I also needed to maneuver the lighter, flexible (and brave) fliers into the center or the back in advance of stunts and pyramids.

To add one more layer of complexity, our football squad consisted of five girls in black uniforms, and five girls in white, so choreographing for fall also had to take into consideration color coordination.

No problem. Patterns like this are a particular specialty of mine, so it was nothing to hold all that information in my head—height, weight, strength, flexibility, bravery, uniform color, and the movement sequences timed to chants and/or music. It all got compiled into my neurological database with its corresponding Tetris screen, then came spitting back out in a dance or cheer.

(Alas, if only I could have comprehended and then integrated social dynamics into my tidy, logical matrices of who I put where. I’ll tell you about that fiasco later. But not in this publication. That’s a Bella & the Beast topic.)¹

In contrast to all this left-brained cheer machination, my own dance solos remained music-led and I didn’t bother writing the moves down. I didn’t need to. As a kid and even into my post-college years, I had a supercomputer in my skull that could store multiple cheers, song lyrics, one-act plays, full-length dances, foreign languages, history facts, chemistry charts, calculus formulas, and Broadway musicals all at the same time without breaking a sweat.

In addition to pattern compilation, I was pretty much a memorization machine. In college I could still remember dances my cousin had taught me in third grade. Until my car wreck in 2000, I could still remember choreographies I’d learned in college as well as the dances we had done for cheer competitions.

A drunk driver changed all that.

Good thing I’d honed a rudimentary written dance language in high school. It was what saved my choreographic butt, allowing me to keep creating and performing stage-caliber dances again after Dain Bramage stole my ability to hold dances and and words in my head. (Another NSFW Beastie topic that I’ve been posting about all winter.)

This was also the way I created dances for my troupes. Many of those were inspired by introducing my students to the various styles of belly dance.

STYLE FIRST

The only other time movements come in advance of musical inspiration is when I’m learning a new dance style or prop, especially when I teach it to myself from watching other dancers on video. (Unfortunately a far too frequent necessity, due to the rural places I have lived and a distinct shortage of funds for lessons.)

I wind up with gobs of notes from a firehosing workshop or I scrutinize videos, accumulating movement sequences, prop work, combos, poses, all jotted down on paper with my ever growing repertoire of stick figures and my personal breed of dance-shorthand.

After that, I have to find the right song to put it all together and really get it into my body. It then becomes like a puzzle, inserting sequences into choruses or creating combos from certain poses which express the melody of a verse. Sections in a song get designated for “put the cane on the head here” and “swinging moves there” and “pick up 2nd cane for the remainder of the song” and “big over-the-shoulder trick to this flourish—ta-dah ending!”

Style also dictated our big shows where we were trying to introduce as many varieties of belly dance as possible. Style definitely dictated the flow and order of my solo gigs at Greek and Moroccan restaurants. Whether it was a 45-minute show or two 20-minute shows, finger cymbals always had to open.

Because.

They do.

When an audience has been sedately eating and chatting since they sat down, you have to first capture their attention. There are few better ways to announce to a multi-room restaurant, “The entertainment has arrived!” than loud, obnoxious zills cutting through the hubbub and even ringing out over the sound system.

This helps alert the patrons that they’re not going to have easy conversations over the volume of my music. It also means I don’t have to take precious onstage time to dink around putting the cymbals onto my fingers.

After that, the dance/song order is compiled into—yes— another matrix to create a dynamic, well-rounded show. I aim for a wave pattern, mixing and matching the following qualities:

• Slow vs. fast moves

• Props vs. pure bodily dance

• Intricate, linear moves vs. gushy

• Party flavor vs. artistic

• Stationary vs. mobile

• For a gala or recital: solo, small group, or large group

These factors dictate which order I put dances in. (And no. Social dynamics, favoritism, or butt-kissing still don’t factor into my matrices, but since I’m not a teenager directing other teenagers, this is something that my dancers have told me they appreciate about my shows.)

I start out with a bang—but not the biggest bang. From there I build up the intensity, then let the audience breathe and swoon. After several of these wave patterns, the crescendo blasts us into the climax—Ka-POW! And then we all party together.

I use this same theory whether I’m organizing a restaurant set, choreographing a four-minute solo, or organizing a two-hour show of multiple groups and soloists. The qualities of each dance style determines its place in the show.

With exception of a 45 minute solo set where I’m wearing the same outfit the whole time, one other factor must be compiled in the wave-pattern matrix: shiny, glitzy costumes vs. earthy ones.

COSTUME FIRST

Ohhhhhh…costumes. Isn’t this half the reason why we dance? Whether we’re getting dolled up for a drum jam around the campfire or to perform with a troupe in a gala show at a ginormous theater, costumes often spark the need for a dance.

NEEEEEED, Precious…

Costumes can often dictate style, too. But not always. Especially not for an experimental, hack-bastardizer fusion artist like me. But they usually determine the combination of styles I’m weaving, as well as the flavor of the dance.

They always dictate movement.

Always.

Doing a bunch of tiny, intricate little pops-and-ticks in two huge ruffled skirts and no fancy-dancey belt? Ummm…no. Those fabulous moves will get lost under all that fabric. Better to wear something streamlined with lots of ornament that will show off the slightest quiver or tick, and really fly with the big moves.

Ohhh, so you want to do a martially inspired sword dance with dramatic stances? Yeahhh, a pencil skirt or mermaid gown is NOT your friend.

Flowy or fringed sleeves could get you killed or, at best, maimed if you try to dance with fire while wearing them. I also don’t recommend polyester fringe or loose, meltable fabrics. Some dancers are brave enough to dance with fire while setting their long, hairspray-flammable locks free.

I am way too chicken for that.

Buk-KAW!

So even when costumes come last, they will make or break movement choices, and can often veto an entire section of moves. With things like heeled shoes, tight skirts, or cumbersome sleeves, costumes can even put the nix on a whole dance, forcing you to start from scratch—either choosing to wear something else or, if you’ve just GOTTA wear that such-and-such, picking different music and different moves to better show it off.

This is why we do costume trials before finalizing a choreography.

CHARACTER FIRST

My made-for-video dance “Blossom,” is the perfect example of a character-first inspiration. As I started writing a novel that was a retelling of the Persephone and Haides myth,² I became obsessed with the Goddess of Spring who is also Queen of the Underworld. Naturally I needed to dance her, because…

I did.

Do. Still.

Anytime I write, I have to create playlists for the car, the kitchen, the shower, cleaning, sewing, anything that isn’t the actual writing time. (I almost always need to write and especially edit in silence.) Any other time? I NEEEEED the soundtrack of my current hyperfixation running on broken-record mode.

Remember Annie?

Yeah. Just like that, but for my own characters and plotlines.

Annie is actually a good example of a dance being inspired equally by character and music, because the song inspiration came from a musical play/movie.

As for character-heavy dances, my “Winter Faerie” dance came from the inspiration of acquiring iridescent faerie wings, whereas both my “Phoenix” dances came from the feel and name of the songs: Lindsey Stirling’s Phoenix, and Red Dragon vs. Phoenix by Solace. My Goldfinger Bond-Babe from “Touch of Gold,” “Siren,” a vampire’s “Dinner”, and the bawdy character I created for “Ghost of Stephen Foster” all came from the music, too.

But Persephone demanded a dance before I ever found Kerli’s song Blossom, ordered wigs, or picked out outfits and filming locations.

The structured improv I did with Ariellah to portray Inanna & Ereshkigal in “Descent to the Underworld” was the same. So were Cleopatra, Princess Leia, and all my Cats.

A character demands to be portrayed, therefore I must hunt for the right music and dress her, arm them with the appropriate props and/or moves, then decide where to put him—on a stage or on a video location.

STORY FIRST

Character is always intimately entwined with story, because I have to decide which moment or mode that a character is in. Is Cleopatra the reigning Queen of the Nile yet? Is she rolling out of the mythical carpet, sand-stained and grimy at Caesar’s feet? Is she so devastated and horrified by meeting Octavian after the death of Antony that she orders up a basket of figs with some bite?

These aspects of my character’s story determines everything about the dance.

But story does not always involve character. Sometimes it’s just me telling you a story. My story. True, there is the stage-face and performance mode to give it polish, but some of my dances are the most raw, uncensored, unmasked moments in which you will ever see me.

All the Angry Girl Dances are me unmasking: “Little Earthquakes,” “32 Flavors,” “Precious Things,” “Demolition,” “Ice Age.” For these video performances, I’d heard these songs a hundred times. But then one day, a random moment of listening to the music informed me that I had a story that needed to be danced.

When whirling and thrashing and flinging and ripping my guts out in the solitude of my own living room weren’t enough to purge it, Story dictated that the emotions evoked by these songs become Dances.

It didn’t matter that I couldn’t put such a huge deviation from belly dance onto a stage at the festivals where I’d been hired to headline. It didn’t matter that a stage didn’t feel right at all. Those stories burned holes in my heart and my feet until I figured out a way to give them life.

Public life.

Most of my sword dances are the same. There will be something growly or martial on my mind that I know I need to dance, and then I’ll hear a piece of music. Suddenly BOOM. There it is.

Sometimes the music and the movements will inform me, as I’m choreographing, that I’m creating the means to tell a story I dare not talk about in any other way. “Journey’s End” and its bookend companion, “Purification” were this way after my first divorce.

The story and characters in the Bollywood musical Devdas gave me the means to tell, in a three-part fantastical, overblown, theatrical way, one of the greatest heartbreaks of my life.

The big Celtic-fusion piece I did with my Tejedora Dance Company was a story that popped into my head, fully formed while I was listening to one of my favorite pieces from Riverdance—yes, for the 173rd time. But then one random day, the story and characters sprang to life when I had finally acquired all the pieces: a co-choreographer who was a Scottish dancer, and a whole troupe who could play the parts of the two warring, exploring, and then collaborating tribes.

In that case, Story combined with Music to give birth to these Characters, each of whom was brought to life by the individual dancers as we played with the choreography.

“Ooh! Ooh! I wanna be the aggressive purist, crossing her arms and refusing to play with that prissy crap!”

“I wanna be the curious, shy one, willing to give it a try. (But only in secret.)”

“Can I come up with a language of offensive gestures as long as I don’t actually flip anybody off?”

“I wanna be the graceful, prissy one who would never deign to mess around with all that stomping and roaring.”

So that is how discovering the right music finally gives me the means to tell a story I’ve been wanting to tell.

Sometimes the story itself comes first with an absolute demanding “NOW!” so I have to go a-hunting for its music.

“Expulsion and Exultation” was a tale that needed to be told in a timely manner to a specific audience. It was about a betrayal and the day I cut ties to set myself free. I didn’t have any clue how to tell it, but its burning was insistent and immediate.

Then I took a class on Guedra, which combined with all the other trance dances I had done in the past. That gave me the movement inspiration for what I wanted to express: purging to clear the pipes, and filling that vacuum with love and light, there to be shared with everybody who had stuck with me through that rough time. After many trials and failures, I found the right music, and then added the costume.

The ginormous dance project I’m currently working on is another example of story coming first. If you’re new around here and you really-super-duper wanna know how that sparked to life, I wrote about awhile back. And a couple other times after that. In fact, this publication has a whole Hyperfixation Section currently dominated by it.³

It’s ridiculous around here. Especially once I realized that I need to put a bunch of these dances on green screen to truly do them justice. Auri in the Underthing and on rooftops, Felurian in her twilit faery grove, Devi before her collection of books, the Cthaeh in its tree…

Sometimes only the proper setting will do.

Which brings us to being inspired by location.

LOCATION FIRST

I don’t consider, “Hey, will you come dance in this show at this place?” or “I need to create a new set for the Moroccan restaurant that I dance at every weekend” examples of location first.

Sometimes I’ll have a dance I’m working on or simply mulling on, and it’s a location that finally—often unexpectedly—allows me to create it. Like when I realized that I needed to film in both snow and blooming flowers to really do Persephone justice, or needing all sorts of different snowy locales to finally finish “Ice Age.”

I’d been tinkering around with Tori Amos’ Winter since 1997 and knew I wanted to make a dance to it. I’d finally started filming pieces of it in 2017, but then one weekend in April 2022, the snow fell. Here’s the key: it fell when I was up for dancing and actually had access to a videographer, so BOOM! I had to get out there to shoot.

Or that time I randomly gained access to the site of a burned-down house that had just been bulldozed. Whoosh! Costume: whipped on. Improv mode: activated. Because I had been messing with Mother for just as long as Winter. I simply never had the right moment come along until 2017. Convenient that I also happened to have my fire-hair to literally be the “red-haired dancin’ girl.”

Synchronicity always tells me when it’s TIME.

But none of that is truly location-led inspiration.

Location-inspired is that time I encountered an interactive fountain in Pueblo, CO and NEEDED to dance in it, Precious!

Or hearing rumors about a pavilion up in Denver that has ancient-style columns, or that there are full-blown sand dunes south of Pueblo. Thus I choose costumes and music to go with such a setting, then head out with video camera and a friend to dance there.

Occasionally, we get nice, full fall leaves behind my parking lot. That was really convenient while I was going through yet another obsession with Lindsey Stirling. Her songs just beg to be danced to out in the Elements.

That season, I was sicker than a dog from three years of trying to convince my entire medical team that my tooth infection was going full-system, but I didn’t care. I wanted to dance with those leaves as my backdrop so badly, and they would disappear within days, only to return—who knows?

We haven’t gotten gorgeous leaves back there since, so I’m glad I just went out there to play even though I didn’t feel my best, my joints were all crabby, and I certainly didn’t look my best. (You can really see it in some of the other costumes that I’d dropped way too much weight and that my muscle, hair and skin tone were just…not right.)

Whatever. When She says, “Dance, monkey girl. NOW,” then if we’re able to, we must obey.

Either that, or we could easily lose our shot.

It’s like the gorgeous azaleas I filmed Persephone’s spring footage in front of. I was tired that week. I Hashtag Didn’t Wanna, but they were particularly full and vibrant that year, and I knew they wouldn’t last long. In fact, the freak snowstorm I filmed all that snow footage in killed them that very next winter, so I have learned well to heed the Muse’s poking.

With those autumn leaves as my driving inspiration, I grabbed all my hyperfixation songs-of-the-month and started tossing on costumes for them. “Guardians” was the last one I filmed, but it was the first one I edited and posted. It’s the story of my eternal gratitude for everybody who is there for me in the good times and the hard, for those who never give up on me, and for those who help me keep going with Everything I have left.

🦋 🔥✨🌸✨🔥🦋

So there you have it.

Inspiration. The creative essence of the Air Element.

It comes in a myriad forms and there is no one right way to make a dance, or any other creative endeavor. So then? What comes first for you? Do you have any inspirations that I missed?

All the dances I mentioned in this post can be found on this playlist:

© 2023 Hartebeast

1. I will tell you how my lack of comprehending social dynamics while determining which cheerleaders should fly and who should base caused some…ahem…issues for me. But not here. I’ll be migrating those kind of stories to my NSWF publication, along with all those Dain Bramage tales:

2. If you’re interested in reading my retelling of the Persephone & Haides myth, you can find it on my other NSFW publication that houses my fantastical romance fiction:

3. How closing a fantasy novel and falling into post-book depression led me to the hugest dance project I have ever obsessed over.

Or heck, if you are also obsessed with these books, here’s the whole Hyperfixator’s Section dedicated to me nerding out about this project. You can opt in or out of it at any time.