The Choreographic Process — From Stimulus to Structure

Choreography is the craft of making dances: shaping movement into an organized, meaningful whole. Although finished works can look effortless and inevitable, they almost always emerge from a messy, iterative process of generating, selecting, and refining material. Understanding that process gives you a reliable way to begin a piece when facing an empty studio, and it is exactly the kind of creative decision-making your Composition and Analysis task rewards.

Starting with a stimulus

Most choreography begins with a stimulus, something that sparks and focuses ideas. Stimuli are often grouped into types: auditory (music, spoken word, sound), visual (an image, painting, object, or place), kinesthetic (a movement quality or sensation), tactile (texture), ideational (an idea, theme, story, or con