Shamira's Tips - Putting Together a Choreography

Q: I wanted to ask you how you come up with your choreos. I have the most terrible problems trying to put one together. After nearly 5yrs of dancing I figured I should be able to make my own choreos up by now!! Any advice would be most welcome. Your choreographies are so interesting and easy to do. - Jan from Australia

A: What I do is, first I choose the music that I want to choreograph to and just play it over and over to get familiar with the music. Sometimes the music will dictate what you should do at certain points, like shimmy, accent, whatever. So choreograph obvious parts of the music first and then work around them. In other words you'll have to fill in what comes before or after those points.

You need to have an arsenal of moves to pick from, of course. Do you have my Sensuous Workout 2 "Pure Technique" DVD? There are 22 chapters of moves in there, plenty to choose from! Next, make patterns. In other words, take 3 or 4 moves and put them together into a pattern. For example here could be a couple of very simple patterns:

Four step-lifts in place
Two triple lifts, open arms
Four step-lifts coming forward
Two triple lifts, closed arm

Four slides right, open arms
Four slides left, open arms
Two slides right, closed arm
Two slides left, closed arm
Four single slides (step sweep)

As you can see, the first pattern only uses variations of step lift and the second one uses all slides. But it moves and changes. Now see where these would fit into the music you want. After you've established a simple beginning, you can start to develop it and get a little fancier. For example, add a pattern that uses more of a mixture of steps, such as:

Big circle right
Hip pops right, left, right, left
Turn right and undulate
Diagonal shimmy
Sufi spin to your left
etc

You'll also want to choreograph an "intro," as lots of pieces will start with a few bars of something before going into the main theme. Fig 8's, double 8's, and small circles are great for intros, because you stay in place before moving anywhere.

I hope this gets you off to a good start!

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