Thread: student and troupe choreographies- how often to use them

hello,

i have only recentely started to get involved in more community events (locally) AND we are organising MORE shows/showcases/hafla's ourselves.

so this is the first time i have this problem. before most of the performances (even with the troupe), were across the country, and for private clients, so we could use the SAME material often, cause the audience was always different people.

now we have like three shows, all local, in the upcoming months, and this just very short after we had our own festival.

a lot of the audience will be the same people (my other students and their friends/family, and our local fanbase)...

so, do you re-use the same choreographies? i cannot possible churn out new material at this pace, as we cannot rehearse more than we are now. we are spicing it up with some new stuff (solo's)...

but for example i'm wondering wheter to cut my troupe numbers out of an upcoming hafla (we have plenty of external professional guest dancers, and i could just shedule a few solo's for some of my troupe and not do the troupe stuff), or to let them re-do something that i think half of the audience has seen already...

and a week later we have a community thing, an open stage the city organises, where we would use the same student numbers, (from my intermediate classes) as we did in the festival in january. here i think (this is the students, not the troupe) we can do the same stuff again, as their family and friends will love to come see them again do their class choreo's. i should just make sure we have new stuff NEXT year.

?

Artemisia

Can you pull out choreographies from the past and re-use them?

Tweak the current choreos (staging, music selection) so it's not brand new but still different?

Good luck!

Different venue, largely new audience why not bring out a tried and tested routine again. We work hard on these so why not get the mileage out of them?
Just make sure it was appreciated initially. I have seen the same mediocre ( to be kind) routine from a local solist 3 times!

I think it's OK to use the same dance. As an audience member, I don't mind seeing dances that I've seen before. Usually my reaction is 'oh, good, I liked this one.' (unless I didn't, then it's 'oh, good, I can go to the bathroom now') Think how many times we watch the same dance video over and over if it's good!

One caveat. If the dance is especially long and I was seeing it again, I might think 'oh, no, not this one again' no matter how good it is. If it's longer than a typical hafla slot and you'll be doing it several times in a season, you might consider trimming it.

My repertory group keeps three or four numbers polished up and ready to go at all times, but I know there are people who've seen our numbers more than once in a season. I'm OK with that.

I think people who attend three community events over a short period expect to see a little repetiton.

I think repeating depends on the artist and the venue. If you are an established performer and you have a routine that is one of your "classics," then it isn't a problem to repeat it fairly often. An audience would be disappointed to go to a Springsteen concert and not hear "Born to Run," no matter how sick of it Bruce might be after 30+ years of singing it.

On the other hand, performers with less reputation for greatness run the risk of giving their audiences the impression that they are "one trick ponies" if they keep reusing their material--especially if their material is coming from a very skimpy repertoire. I am struggling with this same issue myself right now. I can understand the point of performing a routine more than once to really get into it and play with the nuances of the music (insofar as a troupe can do that), but never learning/performing other pieces stunts your growth as a performer.

On short notice, you probably can't do a lot with your situation. If you try to make a lot of changes at the last minute, you run the risk of putting a mess on stage. I think you are probably taking the best approach by inserting solo breaks into your choreographies. At least that way, you are varying sections of a dance, and you don't have to redo the entire routine.

my own solo's will be "all new" (gasp, finally found some new music), but yeah, i think i'll let the students do the same choreo's again, or at least some of them. i kind of also feel they worked so hard on these, we SHOULD do them a few times, and most of the people coming will not be expecting new stuff so fast anyway.

My troupe usually does a choreo 3 or 4 times before we retire it from the hafla circuit.

Originally Posted by artemisia_danst

my own solo's will be "all new" (gasp, finally found some new music), but yeah, i think i'll let the students do the same choreo's again, or at least some of them. i kind of also feel they worked so hard on these, we SHOULD do them a few times, and most of the people coming will not be expecting new stuff so fast anyway.

I always tell my students "Once they got done creating, rehearsing, and costuming 'CATS' they didn't just perform it once!"

My group choreos have about a one year life span during which they might get performed between one and three times for some of the same people. A few popular ones stick around longer for the GP, but I take them off the hafla circuit.

What about an old favourate chorography, that you've had for a few years, but have a new event where 95% of the audience will be new, but the 5 people in the audience you really admire will have seen it done at least 3 times, possibly more.....

The studentish troupe I was in had accumulated a few dozen choreos, so we had a lot to draw from. Also with that number, dances could be retired for a few years and then brought out again.

Often we would have several performances right in a row, so we faced this dilemma a lot. We repeated dances where the venue and dancers available allowed, or we might swap out one or two. It was always easier when we had shows that were similar enough that pieces could be repeated, i.e., for the community festival, we might do the zil number, the veil number and the sword number. For the nightclub show case two weeks later, there might not be room on stage for the veil number, so we'd do the Hakim song instead.

Adding duets/solos in between the group numbers can also change things up a bit.

We also kept a list of which dances we did at which performances, so that even if we repeated dances at events that were close chronologically, we didn't repeat the same dances for the same events year to year. i.e., if we did the tambourine number, the flamenco fusion piece and the saidi dance for the New Year's Eve show or the comic book festival, one year, we wouldn't do the same dances the next year at those events.

Originally Posted by Bellydancingcaroline

What about an old favourate chorography, that you've had for a few years, but have a new event where 95% of the audience will be new, but the 5 people in the audience you really admire will have seen it done at least 3 times, possibly more.....

If it's been a long time since I did it -- I'd do it.

There are choreographies that local dancers have done in the past that I'd LOVE to see again. Things I saw done twice 5 or 6 years ago that I'd be ecstatic to see on the stage again.

of course, that's where it get subjective, doens't it? It's not a question of how many times we've seen it, but how much we liked it!

Here's another factor, though. You could show up at 3 haflas in a row and do the same dance to the same music wearing different costumes and 95% of the audience wouldn't recognize it unless it was really unusual in some way.

that sounds familiar too!!! i think khalida and razia saw me do the same choreographies many times now... at different events with new audiences, except for us watching each other ;-)

Originally Posted by Bellydancingcaroline

What about an old favourate chorography, that you've had for a few years, but have a new event where 95% of the audience will be new, but the 5 people in the audience you really admire will have seen it done at least 3 times, possibly more.....

my teacher always says "don't change your act, change your audience." ..l;,

Originally Posted by Lauren_

Here's another factor, though. You could show up at 3 haflas in a row and do the same dance to the same music wearing different costumes and 95% of the audience wouldn't recognize it unless it was really unusual in some way.

This is so true. As an audience member I saw a show where I *knew* it was the same choreo but had trouble recognizing it with the new costumes

I also have several choreographies which the troupe uses at multiple local events each year. Like other have suggested, we change them up by using different dancers, different costumes -- even doing some of the simpler choreographies to just the drumming of our drum circle rather than to recorded music.

I also keep lists of what we've done where so that we can avoid repeats -- especially at shows that involve the audience paying a fee to see us. A choreography stays active in the troupe for 1-2 years, then is retired for 2-4 years before being brought active again. I choreograph 2-4 new pieces for the group a year and bring back 1 or 2 golden oldies a year. It's not uncommon for members of the troupe to get together outside of our regularly scheduled practices to work up an old routine to perform at shows -- they get to use what they've already learned and the choreo gets new life.

A note on "seen that one before" by the audience: At our annual spring show a few years ago we performed a troupe favorite -- a candle dance -- which we had admittedly done every year for about 4 years prior to that. One member reported hearing this "how many times do you think we'll have to see this one?" while another heard "oh goody -- I love this dance." So you can't please 'em all!

We have a short "finale" dance that we do at the end of every performance. I tried to retire it about a year ago to a quick and sharp rejection of that idea by the troupe who all felt that audiences 'expected' to see us do that number. So, we're still doing it.

I also think that pop pieces have a shorter shelf life than the classics. It drives me crazy when a dancer gets up with the introduction that she is going to be performing to a contemporary Amr Diab song and then hauls out "Nour al Ain." Yeah, everybody loves that song and it's a classic, but it's thirteen years old now! If you want to dance to pop music, you can still use older songs, but make it clear to the audience that you understand the difference between "hot now" and "pop standards." If your objective is to dance to "hot now," you're going to have to change up your repertoire more often, especially if you dance for knowledgeable audiences.