Concept + Context = Concert

By Larry Sousa

 

Creating the Dance Concert Experience

 

 

Your mission is to build your random collection of dances into a theatre experience greater than the sum of its parts.

 

These are my 5 favorite words: “Let’s put on a show!” Really. No, really. As luck would have it, I’m a director/choreographer by trade, so I get to put on lots of shows.  Though I often work on existing theatre pieces, I prefer to create original ones. Making new theatre is always a thrill for me, though I’m convinced that performing a brain transplant on myself would be easier.

 

The big challenge isn’t so much in making theatre; it’s in making theatre that works.

 

Some Golden Rules for Good Theatre:

 

  • Every moment must propel the show’s central idea forward.

  • The journey from the overture to the bows should be chock-full of drama.

  • It all has to make sense.

 

When a show works, I’m drawn in, I’m emotionally involved, I’m relating the events onstage to my own life – basically, I’m a willing captive.

 

That’s the experience I want when I see a show, and that’s the experience I want to provide when I build a show. Good theatre gives us that experience – and a dance concert can be really good theatre. So, how can we create this with the resources we have?

 

Enter Concept and Context (two more words I love). Many, perhaps most, professional dance companies do a variety of pieces in a given performance. The dances are usually intended to be taken in as separate entities, and this format works well for them. But in our dance studio world, the very same format produces that old chestnut known as The Recital (those are two of my least favorite words).

 

I suppose recitals are a necessary evil (uhh…the views expressed by this author are not necessarily those of Goldrush editorial staff).  Recitals, by their catch-all nature, tend to bind your creative hands.  They include every class, every dancer from advanced to recreational, and it’s practically impossible to focus the show beyond a very general theme and some loosely related songs.  And that’s all okay.  It serves its purpose.  Still, try as I might, I just can’t let go of the idea that an entire evening of dance pieces can add up to great drama.  With a concert, you have a better shot at getting there.

 

Your dance studio most likely produces a wide range of short dances created by a variety of choreographers in a vast array of styles and techniques. Your mission – should you choose to accept it – is to build your random collection of dances into a cohesive theatre experience greater than the sum of its parts. For me, that means creating an overall theme for the evening (The Concept), and connecting the existing choreography so that it all supports the theme (The Context). It’s as easy as that, right?

 

I wish. One of my favorite gigs is also one of my most challenging: Every year I leave the safety and security of Hollywood and trek home to Massachusetts to conceive and direct a dance concert for the Sherry Gold Dance Studio. In the interest of full disclosure, I’m the director-of-record for the show, but make no mistake, it’s a group effort.

 

The studio director, Rennie Gold, produces the event, collaborates with me on the concept and the dramatic structure, handles sound and publicity issues, and has lots of choreography in the show. Teacher Kathy Kozul also choreographs a huge amount, coordinates a Kilimanjaro-sized mountain of costumes, and is the backstage manager (a nightmare job I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy). And without modern teacher Nailah Bellinger and the rest of the staff, our great show would be a no-show.

 

Rennie and I approach the concert by creating a thematic concept that is broad enough to apply to our large variety of dance pieces, and specific enough so that we have lots of opportunities for pointed story and drama.  We titled a recent concert “What Moves You?” a phrase which provided us a perfect concept for two main reasons: The double meaning fit with our dance-driven show, and it engaged our audience with a compelling, deeply personal question. And that’s what we’re trying to do with our concert – engage our audience.

 

We then examined the themes and ideas in our existing dances – fear, love, loss, dreams, art, politics, religion, family, war – the pieces which supported our overall theme made it into the show. The more we explored and integrated the idea of “What Moves You” into our work, the more cohesive and emotionally satisfying our show became – we had happened upon the perfect phrase. (A month later, I began seeing an ad campaign by a major automaker featuring the tag line “What Moves You?” And well, we suspect we know where that idea came from…we’re letting the lawyers fight it out).

 

Rennie and I then submit to an evening of torture known as “Crab Rangoon and Vodka Night”, because we need lots of both to get through it. This is when we create the running order of the show. We write down the name of each dance on an index card, and then spend numerous hours arranging and rearranging the cards until the order feels right.

 

It’s torture because we inevitably have the same dancers in back-to-back pieces, or there’s no way the pointe piece and the tap piece will ever relate, or there’s no room backstage for the complicated costume changes we’re causing, and so on.  Still, we refuse to let technical issues dictate the order. It’s the emotional arc that always takes precedent. After all, we’re making a theatre piece.

 

We try to raise the dramatic stakes in our dances based on how they’re placed in context with each other. For example, we had a dance about a lost soul searching for peace amidst chaos. It took on a whole new color when placed in context with a dance about war and politics. Suddenly these separate dances became a kind of suite, commenting on one another. It is particularly rewarding for our dance parents, who’ve seen our individual pieces over and over in competition, to suddenly experience them in a new emotionally richer context.

 

Once we have the order, we invent transitions designed to turn these many numbers into one show. We rarely end a number without creating a theatrical moment to connect it to the next. For a recent holiday concert entitled “Gifts”, our through-line was based on the dancers giving each other presents. Inside the wrapped boxes were specific props – gifts – which propelled us from one piece to the next. For “What Moves You?” we created spoken word voice-over effects. We wrote several short poetic passages related to our theme, and our students recorded them in a nearby sound studio. The dancers also overlapped these taped voices by speaking live.

 

From this point on, we cross our fingers and go full steam ahead, rehearsing, writing and rewriting, editing music and sound, designing lighting, building scenery and costumes in our efforts to turn a random pile of dance pieces into a fulfilling evening of theatre. And yes, it’s stressful. Very. It’s the kind of job I should lose weight doing…but, of course, the opposite occurs. It’s all worth it, though. Here are eight reasons:

 

One) The concert provides our dancers the opportunity to perform in front of a “real” audience, as opposed to a competitive audience. Ironically, your concert and competition audiences might be made up of exactly the same people. But at competition, audiences tend to favor the “team” they came to root for. By contrast, concert audiences are there for the experience of watching a great show, so they support everyone onstage. And these audiences behave more formally – you probably won’t hear anyone scream “GO ASHLEY!” which is fine by me (though I’ve always loved Ashley’s work). Call me old-fashioned, but the more we can expose young dancers to proper audience etiquette, the better.

 

Two) Our theme-driven concerts expose young dancers to the idea that there’s something in the world called “concept.” They are able to comprehend how the short dances they’ve learned in isolation are now contributing to a larger story.

 

Three) The concert challenges our dancers to learn new material and bring it to performance level quickly. I arrive about a week before our concert opens. So the dancers have just days to master new transitions, new beginnings and endings of familiar pieces, and so on. It keeps them on their toes.

 

Four) The concert exposes our students to acting and storytelling. Many of the transitions we create involve speaking, or some sort of non-dance physical action. The dancers have to deal with speaking loudly without microphones, and with the challenge of making physical comedy pay off with a laugh.

 

Five) The concert gives our students the opportunity to perform under real theatrical lighting – this is a bigger deal than it might seem. It is challenging to perform with a spotlight in your face, or in dim moody lighting, or intense side light where you can’t see the floor or the audience. Young dancers need to figure out how to deal with this. It’s also very important for them to learn about hitting specific positions on the stage. The theatre in which we perform our concert has a limited amount of specials (specific lights focused for a dramatic effect). Our dancers have learned that if they miss that vitally important down-stage-center position, the special light that’s focused there won’t hit them and the dramatic moment we’ve all worked so hard to create will be lost.

 

Six) Our concert forces the students to deal with a showbiz reality: fast costume changes.

 

Seven) Our concerts have expanded our audience. When was the last time you got a whole bunch of people to come to a recital?  Erasing dance recital stigma is pretty hard, but who doesn’t love a good concert?  Ours now has a loyal following of non-dance studio fans.

 

Eight) Here’s what I love the most: the concert brings us all together. We do it as a benefit for organizations such as UNICEF, local youth programs, and friends in need.  The event cultivates a sense of purpose, and everyone gives their all because they want it to work.

 

When a performance works perfectly, theatre folks say it “crackled.” This year our concert really did. The dancers worked as a team and they brought their A-game. Every dance was right, every image seemed breathtaking, every joke got laughs. We assembled our vast array of dances into a cohesive, emotionally rich event, and the whole thing connected seamlessly. We perform our concert on a dusty old Junior High stage. But when that show crackles, it sure feels a lot like Broadway. And that’s worth flying across the country for.

 

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