ON LEARNING CHOREOGRAPHY, PART 1

OK, so during Roberto Amaral’s first intermediate/advanced level Bulerias por fiesta class of the year, only my right leg felt like a rubberband, which is an improvement over both legs. The current struggle is not so much physical, but mental.

I used to be able to learn choreography pretty quickly. At least I thought I did. It’s been over 5 years since I’ve had to learn someone else’s choreography, and that was an Alegrias and a Guajira by Antonio Vargas over the course of 5 days. A little rough, but only because I was very drowsy from being in my first trimester (no one knew, not even Antonio, and I didn’t tell him because I didn’t want him to treat me any differently from usual). I certainly was able to learn everything quickly enough to feel almost performance ready on the Guajira by the end of the week.

The thing is, I had always felt like I had this process for laying down choreography inside my head, a way of instantly organizing sequences so that they were easy to “pull up” as we would run through them. After yesterday, I’m not sure if the gears in my head are just rusty or if I need to rethink my process – does my hardware need cleaning or does my software need an upgrade?

Granted, I’ve never had to learn an entire Bulerias at tempo in an hour-and-a-half -- that’s the first thing to just get used to. And this was not your standard llamada with some cute marking and then some fun footwork thrown in. No. This was every single step, arm, and head movement, from salida through coletilla, and it was all about contra-or-not and weight shifting-or-not.

For me the individual sequences were quite reasonable to grasp -- not easy, but certainly very reasonable at this skill level. And for the first hour of class, I felt fine, like I was putting it all together in my usual way and handling the run throughs comfortably. But then I hit a wall. Suddenly, the choreography fell apart for me at a very specific point about halfway through, and I just couldn’t keep the individual sequences in the right order anymore. Roberto even took a moment out to specifically clarify that combination for me; he could see clearly where my struggle was, and I truly appreciate his effort to get through to me. But a day later, I’m still not quite sure what happened inside my head and why I couldn't pull it all back together by the end of class.

The one consolation moment occurred as I was changing my shoes after class when the guitarist, on his way out, stopped and said to me, “You have really nice arms, whoever you are.” Wow, I was so grateful for the compliment (and I give all the credit for nice arms to Ciro, and I will post an entire article on Ciro and arms in the future for sure). But as I write this, I’m also thinking, wait, that’s probably the one thing I wasn’t thinking about. At any rate, thank you, Tony, the guitarist (I will find out his last name for you all next week).

So… if anyone out there has any words of wisdom/anecdotes/observations/commiserating-type comments, please, please feel free to post them below. I will be chronicling my progress in this class each weekend – wish me luck.

 

A VER

Jacco Muller and the Dutch Flamenco Biennial