WRITING GUIDE FOR DANCE

Watching the Dance | Organizing Your Ideas | Outlining | Writing

People usually go to a dance for entertainment and leave with more of an emotional response than a coherent analysis or interpretation. Emotional response is important, but to write a dance paper you must make observations about the specific form and content of the dance.

What do you pay attention to and how do you remember it later? The first step is to think about your response to the work: look at how you feel, what has made you feel that way, and why...

Watching the Dance

Think about what you are seeing. Compare works to each other, and talk about them with other people. The more something stays on your mind, the easier it will be to write about it.

Take notes. You can do this even for just a short section of the piece. Write down any little details you notice. Notes are important resources for the writing process, especially when you are removed from the source.

The important thing to grasp and remember is the form of the dance. Look at and record the events of the dance. Write down the order of movements. Describe phrases in terms of the shape and quality of the movement. Describe the mood: music, lighting, costume, the general atmosphere. Identify the style -- if this the dance looks like a style that you recognize (i.e. ballet), then take notes on what characterizes that style. Notice contrasts. Write down any words that come to your mind while watching. Associations that you make with the dance, or just what it reminds you of, usually become the basis for a paper.

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Organizing Your Ideas

Work with your notes to see how well they fit together, looking for patterns or contradictions. Try to solidify your impression of the piece. The more you work on these ideas, the more material you will have to develop. Eventually you will need to choose a manageable topic. You can't talk about everything, so you should choose a theme appropriate to the paper length. For dance papers this may mean ignoring much of what you saw. 

Make a sequential outline of the events of the dance: list the order of movement phrases, the changes in mood (music or lighting), and the changes in style throughout the piece.

Review your general impression of the dance, considering the words you associated with the dance and the dance's sequence of events. This is called "reading" a dance, and is analogous to a "reading" of a book. Trust your instincts on a dance: you don't need to be an expert to get a feeling about a dance. Ambiguous readings are fine, they even give you more to talk about. 

Come up with specific examples from the dance which illustrate your reading, or relate your reading to the experience of dancing in your class.

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Outlining

This is the road-map for your paper: you don't necessarily have to follow it but it is helpful to have as much information as possible in front of you while you are writing. This is the best place to really figure out how you are going to describe or prove your point. List your concepts and the examples which help to illustrate them. Summarize each main idea in one sentence and then list the things that prove it underneath. Order your ideas so they make sense. Usually you can establish some flow between them which relates back to your main point. This doesn't have to be in any particular form, just enough so you can follow the order of ideas while you are writing. Write everything in the plainest language possible, to make sure your ideas are clear -- you can get fancy later.

You can talk separately about different elements of the dance, such as style or mood, and then discuss how they worked together to create a theme or you can take certain events in the dance and discuss how they each occurred, and how they fit together to create meaning.

Mold each idea around your general feeling for the dance: if it was totally wacky then talk about the wacky music, lighting, costumes, etc. If the movement of the wacky dance reminded you of cars driving on the highway, then use examples of movement shapes or phrases to describe that.

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Writing

This is always the hardest part but you can cut down on your work at the computer considerably by outlining. Sit down with your outline and just start writing out your ideas. Don't worry at first about making everything flow perfectly.

The most important thing to do is give yourself a decent amount of time to write, so you don't get too stressed out. Stick with it until your ideas are expressed. If this doesn't come easily at first, you can always return and revise. Don't get discouraged and talk to your teachers if you get hung up.

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