choreography (part one)

"I'm teaching a choreography class this term," I half-joke to my mom. "I, who have no choreography to speak of."

"Yes, isn't that strange?" she agreed. I didn't quite expect her to agree so wholeheartedly so I wasn't able to reply and continue our conversation.

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I'm qualified to teach the class, rest assured. I took enough choreography classes and seminars for me to know what I'm doing and what other people should be doing as well. And I have some choreography that I've done, probably buried in the memories of those that came across it. I still remember them, some of them quite clearly actually.

My earliest stabs at choreography of course were making dances for the kids in our school for recitals, and then in high school, I was sometimes asked to do an intermission number. Those were improv, even before I had training in improv. I just played music I knew by heart and let go. Once, it was Linggo ng Wika (Language Week) and I danced a short nationalistic thing with lots of chest-clutching, arabesques, whirls and leaps. By then, I had already figured out that these intermission numbers were going to need structure so that I just didn't do the same thing over and over again. There you go, choreography.

In college, we had a similar choreography class but it wasn't handled quite the way I'm handling the one I'm teaching now. The teacher was given a venue grant at the CCP and was preparing a group of her own works for a solo concert. Since she was so busy and focused on her concert, our class turned into helping her prepare for her show and we did no choreographing of our own. During that time, I didn't mind so much, being a freshman and all, but later I did feel that I missed out.

I was very good in improv though, starting with my high school escapades, then later when I formally learned about it and trained in it in the CCP summer workshops. Well, I wasn't spectacular or brilliant, but competent enough, I guess. It was a progressive thing.

I would do some solo improv numbers, quite like I used to in high school, but with the added pretense that what I was doing was "art". Most of it were forgettable, though I was proud of some of them. Some others, though not particularly brilliant, were memorable because of the situation in which I had danced them.

Like that one time, when I was a councilor in the college council, we had all these activities for Christmas, one of them being a harana sa dorms (dorm serenade), where different musician volunteers were to play at the different dorms in the campus. Of course, all the boys wanted to play at the all-girls dorm (I think Sampaguita? Am I right?) or at Kalayaan, the freshman dorm. I remember that Joey Dizon, a guitar major friend of mine, and I played in Kalayaan while Miguel, who was at one time the love of my life, played at the girls dorm. He drove me and Joey to Kalayaan and watched the first two pieces - Joey would play random pieces he knew and I would do a bit of interpretative dancing, using the emotional tone of the piece as my benchmark for the kind of dancing I would do. I remember the first pieces felt like happy-in-love pieces and that's what I danced. Or, possibly, I was happy in love because Miguel was watching.

Fast forward a few years later, still in college, in love with another boy. I was applying for a literary org named UP Quill and fell in love with one of their genius poets, Mayo. He liked me back. The org has a poetry reading that is a big deal every semester and members and applicants can volunteer to read. My friend and co-app, Ella (I don't remember her last name), and I did a performance piece entitled From a Poet to a Dancer, or something similar. The whole org was in on it because Mayo were in our first blissfull weeks of togetherness, and here I was, dancing to a poem that basically explained why the Poet (in this case, Mayo) was so in love with the Dancer (me). Reports say that Mayo was rendered speechless by my performance. Our romantic relationship lasted only a month or so, but it still is a nice memory. I think it was the only time Mayo had ever seen me dance.

I interpreted another poem for another genius poet friend, Allan Popa, when he launched his book, Morpo. He wrote a poem about Nijinsky and I danced it out, as Nijinsky. I structured out my dance according to the poem, and spoke bits of it while dancing to mostly silence, and imagined what Nijinsky would have done in my place. I was very proud of that and I think Allan really liked it, too. That was perhaps my last solo improv.

My most brilliant solo improv was back in college, for my 20th Century music class. I don't know if they still do this today, but my music literature teacher, Pat Brillantes, would require performances for each period of history we were enrolled in, under her. Same thing went for our 20th Century music class, which I was taking in lieu of Music for Dance, which was not being offered for another two or three semesters, but I needed the credit that year as I wanted to finally graduate. Since I was the only dance major taking 20th Century Music, I organized it so that the younger dance majors taking History 2 with Ma'm Pat and I were to show our dances in one performance in the studio, so two classes were in attendance of our mini-recital. After the younger kids did their Classical music presentation, I performed an improv to one of my favorite pieces of music ever, the first movement of Leonard Bernstein's Symphony for Violin, Strings and Percussion.

After the show, Nina asked me if I pre-choreographed any of it or was it all just pure improv because it looked well thought out and quite synched to the music - and well, it's not really easy to synch improv to Bernstein. I told her I just knew the music really well. She said we should have documented my solo so that I could do it again, because it was really good. Miguel saw it, too, and said it was one of the best things I had ever done. Not that I did much, but that was very nice to hear.

Which is probably why you can't get me too excited about the current wave of solo performances in gallery or studio venues, or why you can't get me to join in. I've done my share of solo improv and it's not really something I'm all that interested in. I do applaud the group works that are not improv at all, those I've seen in studio venues anyway, especially Nina Hayuma Habulan's pieces. I'd rather do those than solo improv. But I'm not really inclined to choreograph either.

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(to be continued)