Choreography for Dummies?

Lately I've become really interested in choreography and how it works and where choreographers draw their inspiration from and how the interperet music, be it Argentine tango, samba or swing.

For those of you who regularly create your own routines (as opposed to fully-fledged productions), where do you start?

What method is there to your madness? How do you know when a piece is good enough to stop? How do you find the balance between showing your own (or your dancers') technical prowess through subtle basics via glitzy, difficult moves?

Depends on who you are doing it for. Above all moves should be cleanly executed. Taking the skill level of performers you then consider the audience, and how long the performance is going to be. Keeping that in mind the song/songs is/are chosen.

Personally I would choose songs that I love, that I can get into, which I can do well technically. If I can't get into the song then I discover that my dislike for it grows as I practice, until it is a fight to do it as I should. I feel that this is important because you practice, and practice, and practice to the song, again, again, and again...

I've wondered abuot that too, MadamSamba. Like, how does a ballroom teacher with little choreography training come up wth routines for all his/her students?

Since most students are social dancers or syllabus-level competitors, it's not too difficult to put together choreography. It's just a matter of picking the patterns and stringing them together, you're not inventing new moves along the way too.

The teachers with open-level students are usually ex-high-level-competitors themselves, so they've got the experience necessary to create out-of-syllabus routines. Even then, there are a lot of popular "named variations" that everyone uses all the time, so one can still get by just stringing together interesting patterns.

Social and competitive routines aren't about matching moves to the music -- that's what a real choreographer does -- but rather about giving you something to get around the floor with interest and style.

i do a lot of my own choreography cuz i really enjoy it and i like to do my own moves. i get a lot of my inspiration from other dancers and other choreographers. since i dance jazz/hip hop a lot, i look at many famous singers and dancers and i tend to get ideas from them because i really like it. i also use my mom as inspiration. i'll model a couple moves for her to see if she likes it or not and she'll give me ideas on how to improve it and stuff like that.

I muck around with choreography from time to time. For me it's more about listening to the music and just letting yourself go to see what feels natural. You can then use that as a basis for a step or movement during that part of the music. I have made some suggestions while my instructor was choreographing our routine and he kept most of them in the routine, with some minor adjustments and added styling. I was quite proud of that!

I was very lucky in that my first teacher's dad is a fabulous Broadway dancer, who also does ballroom--he choreographed all of our routines even after I had moved on to another teacher (and I still run into him, may work with him on a short film this summer).

Of course, the thing is, his choreography is really more theatrical than ballroom, so to take some of it and use it in just the ballroom comps, you have to play with it a bit.

Daffy--is your mom a dancer?

my mom's not much of a dancer anymore but she used to dance a lot before, especially when she was around my age. i think just because she's my mom and she has a great taste, i look up to her for inspiration