21M.712: Choreography — Making Dances by Ankita D. '23

I’m taking a choreography class this semester! I heard about it in my freshman year, but only just got around to taking it since it was hard to schedule around; it’s 1-3 every Tuesday/Thursday and spring-only. I’m glad I committed to taking it since it’s just as great as I expected, and I’m super excited to have the opportunity to create choreography in an academic setting. every studio session feels like a blissful respite from the academic pressure of MIT, even if the pressure is significantly reduced now that I’m a senior.

the class has a mix of trained dancers, self-taught dancers, and people with no dance experience whatsoever. some people dance in MTA musicals,⁠01 mit music and theater arts others on dance teams on campus, and the rest just enjoy dancing. with everyone coming from a different background, it makes for a really interesting experience. I’m a self-taught dancer, so observing the people with formal training inspires me to experiment and take more risks, which I appreciate a lot.

the instructor is a choreographer, dance filmmaker, and performer from Brooklyn. since she has a kid at home, she literally flies up from New York on Tuesdays and Thursdays for class. I’m really glad she does—it’s great to have a teacher with such a huge range of experiences.

in the first few classes, we started to experiment with moving our bodies in different ways. the instructor told us to move around the room at different speeds, and when she said stop, she would give us an instruction of a texture, or feeling of a movement, to create. for example: “melt like an ice cube,” “float like a leaf on the ocean,” and “act like a balloon that’s been pricked and is gushing air.” this sort of improvisational activity was new to me, but pretty fun once I stopped internally cringing about how stupid I look. I started to understand how my theater kid friends are so comfortable with stepping out of their comfort zone, because when you have to run around a studio acting like a paper airplane more than once, you start to shed your ego entirely.

when we practiced moving across the room with different textures, the ways in which we interpreted the given quality (for example, airy/floaty) varied, but we all felt comfortable moving in the way we wanted. there are no stakes to the class, so messing up is commonplace and accepted. it took only two classes for me to feel like I 1. didn’t have anything to prove and 2. was just there to have a good time and learn.

we built up to making our own choreography with accumulation studies, where we would each create a move corresponding with an activity we enjoy, and then piece them together and “stage” them, aka arrange them to make a performance. we also learned BASTE, which stands for:

• Body
• Action — axial/locomotor
• Space — direction/level/location/path/relationship/size
• Time — tempo/speed/duration/rhythm
• Energy — quality/flow/feeling/weight

as someone who has only choreographed by just freestyling to music, it was interesting to be introduced to an actual breakdown of choreographic concepts. none of these have ever been at the forefront of my mind when I create a piece, except maybe “is this too repetitive/boring??”

keeping the BASTE concepts in mind, we moved to our first assignment, which was a solo project involving making choreography that’s confined to a box. our instructor gave us a sheet of paper with a cube on it, then told us to randomly select 26 points within or on it. next, we randomly assigned the numbers 1-26 to each of the points, wrote the numbers at the bottom of the paper, and wrote the letters beneath them. then, we assigned arbitrary body parts to the numbers and letters. finally, we could piece together the prompt: to spell out our names by moving from point to point inside the box, using the corresponding body part each time.

I was initially offput by this assignment. I didn’t know how to feel about, well, being confined to a literal box, or having to use different body parts to make contact with 13⁠02 number of letters in my name randomly distributed points. it seemed too structured; I didn’t want to have to put my back on the ground or my head six feet in the air⁠03 promptly modified this one... just because the prompt told me to. there also was the fact that this didn’t involve music, and we’d be dancing in complete silence.

the inspiration for this assignment was this solo, featuring a smaller box and much more trained dancer. nothing in this piece seemed familiar to me as a dancer, which only intensified my hesitation about my own piece.

after a week, we presented rough drafts of the first five letters of our dances. watching the other pieces, I was frustrated with my work and envious of my classmates who are trained in dance styles like ballet and jazz. they seemed to have a much broader range of tools available to them, and in comparison, I felt limited in my strength, balance, and flexibility.

things changed once I started adding transition movements in the dance style I’m most comfortable with. actually hitting the points in the cube was annoying, but dancing around the space was pretty fun. it only got better once we were given the option to add music. we could choose our own song, ask our instructor to pick one, or dance in silence. I immediately thought of a song that could work—Hazey by Glass Animals—which I’ve wanted to dance to since freshman year. miraculously, with only a few minor additions and revisions, it worked with the choreography.

as we finished stringing together all the letters in our names, the instructor asked us to incorporate more elements: a dramatic tempo change somewhere in the middle of the piece, and a return to the center of the box at each “space” in our names. meaning, we’d start at the center, return after our first name, and return at the end. this added complexity that I was excited about, given that I actually liked my choreography now.

three weeks after we were given the assignment, we performed for the class and filmed our pieces. we had the option to wear costumes of our own choosing, which ranged from all black clothes to a full on green fursuit (I wish I was joking.) after watching a piece, we wrote feedback for each classmate, which was all super positive and fun to read.

comparing how I felt performing the final iteration of my choreography to how I felt performing the first draft, I was pretty shocked. the moves didn’t change at all, but I enjoyed them so much more.

overall, the assignment was super fun, not stressful, and interesting to create. trusting the process was hard, but as a senior who’s danced throughout college, it was a fascinating experience to put together a piece from the bottom up for the first time. it’s also interesting to have done this in an actual class setting during the day. going from Nonconvex Optimization to “dance like you’re a rock falling off a cliff” always gives me whiplash.

being able to take a class like this feels unreal. I’ve heard similar things from my friends who take acting classes, and I’m glad I got the chance to experience it before graduating. with the Beatles class last semester and now this one, I feel like I’m finally exploring the parts of the course catalog I’ve always wanted to try, which makes me really happy.

I’m so glad 21M.712 still exists and has a great instructor! I would highly recommend it for anyone who:

• enjoys dancing
• wants to learn more about dance
• wants to feel more comfortable in their bodies
• is excited about new ways of being creative
• wants a two-hour break from psets twice a week!

I’m glad this was my first (and last) taste of Theater Arts classes at MIT. if I could redo my four years, I would definitely take more of these. I already feel like my entire perspective of dance has shifted and I’m more comfortable with stepping out of my comfort zone. if you need a HASS-A⁠04 art portion of humanities requirement to graduate and love to dance, this is the class for you!