Dance Education Blog

Blog by Nadia Ureña, NDEO Intern, Fall 2024

For college applications, merit awards, grants, or even just simple showcases, dancers are often asked to describe their own choreography in writing.Yet where does one begin? How can an entire choreographic process and work be described in a simple paragraph. Additionally, dance makers may feel challenged to condense longer works into simple ideas. As a former undergraduate and graduate student in dance, choreographer, and a teaching assistant of several undergraduate writing intensive and composition courses, I have had to introduce students to writing about their processes and their artistic goals.This blog is dedicated to offering some simple suggestions to make dance description less daunting.

1. Start with the overall theme!
   1. Introduce viewers into what the dance is about conceptually. What ideas, questions, or subjects were you playing with in the studio? If your dance is a personal story, introduce us to it in a way that feels comfortable for you too. If your dance is researching an abstract idea, historical moment, feeling, phrase, or poem define what for your readers what it is.
2. Describe the process of your dance!
   1. What inspired the movement choices of your piece? Was it the music, a gesture phrase, or a rhythm? Was each step choreographed specifically or was there play between phrases and improvisation? Describe the process of how movement was invented for your work. This helps give context on both how the piece was created and your values as an artist!
3. Consider yourself!
   1. How were you impacting by making this dance? Did you learn something new about yourself as an artist, a human, or your community? Were there any obstacles or ruts in your process that you had to overcome or were there areas of leadership you stepped into when choreographing? How do you see yourself now after choreographing this piece?
4. Consider the audience!
   1. Consider what impact you want to leave your audiences with. How do you want people to feel after watching the piece? Is your aim to entertain, to inform, or to move? While you cannot control how a person views your dance, use language like “I hope the audience can…” or “my dance may make people…” to give a sense of the overall feeling you as a choreographer wish to leave on your audience.
5. Think into the future!
   1. If you imagine your dance being expanded in the future use some of the essay to imagine how the dance may develop. Do you see this dance becoming even longer or traveling to other venues and showcases? Imagining where a smaller dance could continue may show colleges and organizations your own creative ambition.
6. Be specific!
   1. Not every person who will read your essay may understand dance the same way as you. Use clear descriptive words to describe your process and your piece. Use strong adjectives and verbs to highlight and emphasize important concepts attached to your dance.
7. Be concise!
   1. Like dance making it is helpful to be intentional on what to keep and what to cut. Many applications have a word limit so while it is easy to want to describe your process in great length, prioritize what you feel is best representative of the dance you made to the college, organization, or group you are writing to.
8. Proofread!
   1. Everyone makes mistakes but it is important to go back and check for any spelling or grammar errors. Sometimes it is helpful to read your essay aloud or use a program like text to speech to hear anything that may sound amiss. Have a friend, teacher, or family member check your work and make sure your messaging is clear and understandable.

While this list is not comprehensive, I hope that these are some useful tools and tips to jump start into writing about dance for an application!

Nadia Ureña, an NDEO intern in Fall of 2024, is an active performer, choreographer, and researcher who aims to intersect dance studies with black feminism, media theory, video games, existential philosophy, and memes based in Philadelphia. As a performer, Nadia worked with professional artists such as Orion Duckstein, Charles Anderson, Cynthia Gutierrez- Garner, Xiang Xu, The Megan Flynn Dance Company, and Teresa VanDenend Sorge. She has performed at The Cincinnati Fringe Festival, the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, 30/30/30 in NYC, KYLD’s Inhale Series, the American Dancers Guild 2024, and Wax Works in NYC. As a scholar, Nadia is interested in questioning and reimagining how dance composition courses in higher edu. could refocus on a honing a choreographic process instead of emphasizing choreographic products. She served as a panelist at the 2023 NDEO Conference about teaching undergraduate students about labor rights. Nadia recently earned her MFA in Dance at Temple University. At Temple she was a Graduate Fellow and recipient of the 2024 Katherine Dunham Award for Creative Dance Research. She received a B.A. in Dance and Media & Communications from Muhlenberg College and spent a semester abroad at the Accademia dell’Arte in Arezzo, Italy.

Photo Credits: Featured photo by Hannah Hall, head shot by Katherine Dooros Photography