Dance Creation and Composition
Dance Creation and Composition asks how movement is generated, selected, developed, and shaped into a dance. The exam tests improvisation, motif and development, choreographic form and devices, spatial and dynamic design, collaboration, and reflection. Questions often ask you to predict the effect of a choice or to choose the revision that best serves a stated intent.
Building and developing movement
- A motif is a short, identifiable movement phrase with a clear rhythm, shape, or dynamic. Development keeps a recognizable kernel while changing context: repetition, retrograde, inversion, augmentation, diminution, fragmentation, and accumulation.
- Canon presents the same material overlapping in time; unison presents it simultaneously. Accumulation adds one phrase at a time. Chance procedures (Cunningham, Cage) use non-intentional systems to select order or spacing.
- Improvisation needs a score: a prompt, constraint, or task. Contact improvisation uses shared weight, rolling point of contact, and momentum rather than lifted partnering.
Form and production
- Common forms: AB, ABA, rondo, theme and variation, narrative, and through-composed. Abstraction selects and distills rather than illustrating a story.
- Space: levels, pathways, formations, stage zones, and focus. Time: tempo, meter, syncopation, and phrasing. Energy: Laban effort qualities (weight, time, space, flow).
- Transitions and stillness carry meaning; dance for camera adds framing, shot size, and editing to the compositional decision.
Worked example
A four-count motif is "step, reach, turn, drop." To create contrast and a canon, keep the four actions but assign them to two groups offset by two counts; vary level on the reach and make the drop a suspended fall. The kernel survives, but timing and spatial relationship change. The reasoning: canon changes when material occurs, not what the material is.
Traps
- Calling overlapping same material unison.
- Assuming abstract dance has no meaning.
- Adding steps without compositional intent.
- Ignoring transitions and relying on music to supply phrasing.