One might say that the relationship between a dancer and choreography feels instinctual – it’s an obvious pairing. However, as a dancer-student (or student-dancer), my experience with choreography in college has come to extend beyond the studio's walls. Having been met countless times with the, “Oh, you’re a dancer?” remark, I began to reflect more intentionally on the two identities that defined my college life – the student that people already knew, and the dancer that often caught them off guard. I felt it might be meaningful to explore the connection between the two major identities I held in college – how they intersect, inform and enrich one another. While I never quite felt a strong reaction to such comments, it has prompted me to consider how being labelled as a dancer influences not just how others see me, but how I understand myself in relation to both dance and learning. Specifically, this piece reflects on how my choreographic experiences have led me to see choreography as a collaborative, meaning-making process – understood through the lens of both a dancer and a student.
For most of my life, dance choreography has been handed to me. In fact, my training in both classical ballet and contemporary dance could be said to follow a formula: receive movement sequences (either from renowned ballet choreographers or contemporary dance instructors), master the piece to the best of my technical abilities and present it as a reflection of someone else’s vision. My role as a dancer, and understanding of choreography, has always felt defined by execution – a unidirectional and one-dimensional process. However, my creative endeavors in university have transformed choreography into something more complex: a dynamic process of meaning-making – an avenue for inquiry, collaboration and personal development.
I took USE2321 Examining Local Lives in Year 1, where the Dance your… assignment tasked dance crews with embodying how the group engaged with a given intellectual thought through movement. Specifically, my group focused on Matthew Hall’s (2019) argument that plant personhood should be understood through a relational, animist-inspired framework, acknowledging plants as persons through interdependence and care, rather than imposing human-centric projections onto them. While the human-centric perspective defines personhood based on human traits such as sentience and communicability, a relational approach conceives personhood as emerging through networks of care and dependence. Beyond the jargon used, Hall’s abstractness of plant personhood was completely incomprehensible to me – my former understandings of personhood were fixated on the human-centric view, and I struggled to grasp how some vague interrelation could make plants persons. Yet, as the “dancer” of the group, I was naturally delegated to translate this complexity into movement.
Unlike a typical rehearsal in the studio, where dancers immediately dive into steps, this choreographic exercise kicked off with a sit-down session focused on deconstructing the text and identifying the key arguments to showcase. This discourse, where my peers patiently explained each concept, was crucial in helping me gradually empathise with Hall’s perspective. Particularly, the group was drawn to a poem (Exhibit 1A) that Hall thought “succinctly described the awareness and perspective of plant persons” and was inclined to incorporate a gesticulation and recitation of the poem to conclude the performance. In subsequent sessions, as we mapped out dance sequences (Exhibit 1B), and re-engaged with Hall’s ideas, the co-creation of movement with peers also helped me to better visualize the interrelations between plants and humans. Even a simple action, such as someone role-playing as a plant and pointing to a human (Exhibit 1C), enabled me to picture the relational dynamics between plants and humans as envisioned in Hall’s framework.
This choreographic exercise pushed me to translate Hall’s arguments into a blend of movement and speech, allowing abstract concepts to take on a tangible, visual form that made them more accessible to me. In other words, choreography became both a method of inquiry, helping me engage more deeply with Hall’s ideas, and a mode of communication, enabling my crew to share our interpretation of Hall’s argument with the class through embodied storytelling. Remarkably, this was achieved through ‘crude’ movements and the contributions of non-dancers, demonstrating that meaning can emerge even from the most unrefined forms of physical expression.
A more technical perspective of choreography emerged in Year 2, through The Anatomy of a Line, a contemporary dance piece I performed in NUS Dance Synergy’s annual production Fuse(d). Initially, I approached the setting as a familiar one – learning a predetermined sequence of movements and executing them to the best of my technical and artistic abilities. However, I soon found myself deeply involved in co-choreography, working independently as well as in duos and trios with fellow dancers.
While my peers seemed to construct and connect movement sequences effortlessly, I struggled to even envision the next step. Consumed by a desire to craft the “perfect” move (whatever that means) to align with the choreographic prompt, I became trapped in a mental block that stifled my ability to produce anything. Over time, as I was engaged in more choreographic exercises – sharing my work and learning from others to construct the entire dance – I gradually shifted my mindset to a less rigid one. Recognizing the futility of forcing “beautiful” static poses into the rhythm of “5, 6, 7, 8”, I embraced a more fluid approach, allowing myself to move and breathe through positions instead. Trusting my body to guide me toward what felt natural in the moment, I adopted a more intuitive, flow-based perspective – focusing on seamless transitions between steps and letting the movement evolve organically.
This process led to a personal breakthrough in self-choreography. By focusing on the linkages between movement and effectively communicating the “feel” of the movement to others, I developed a deeper technical appreciation for the choreographic process in dance. As my fellow dancers and I communicated the steps we created with each other, the piece also became more than just a group of dancers executing steps together; it was transformed into an act of ownership – of crafting movement with clarity, then refining it collaboratively.
Exhibit 2, a short segment I created, is a testament to this collaborative refinement. What began as a rough idea of mine gradually took shape through countless discussions and adjustments with my fellow dancers. Together, we fine-tuned the counts, breathing, emphases and texture of the movement so that we could all embody and express a unified “feel”.
No longer just a structured sequence of steps to be memorized and executed, choreography has evolved to become a multifaceted tool to create meaning. By translating abstract academic concepts, like plant personhood, into movement, I was offered an opportunity to deepen my engagement with complex ideas and transform them into tangible, visual expressions that helped me better internalize the concepts. On a technical level, choreography became a personal endeavor, a development of dance artistry and a reconsideration of what movement signifies to me as a dancer. In both explorations, the common thread of collaboration – whether with non-dancers or fellow dancers – was also crucial in transforming choreography into an avenue for both intellectual exploration and personal growth. Choreography became a bidirectional process, where my contributions shaped the work as much as the collective input of others influenced the creative development.
More importantly, these experiences have allowed me to reconcile my dual identities as a dancer and a student. Where I once saw them as distinct, I now recognize how they can enrich each other. Choreography, then, is not just about crafting movement, but a shared creative process of creating meaning that extends far beyond the stage.
References
Hall, M. (2019). In Defence of Plant Personhood. Religions, 10(5), Article 5. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10050317
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