Choreography.....

Choreography, particularly Line Dance, was a natural progression for me. After all, SOMEBODY has to write the dances we teach! However, I confess that my first steps into choreography, rather than being a creative need in me, were mainly borne out of desperation....I needed a dance to teach - and I couldn't find anything I liked from other choreographers, so I wrote my own! They seemed to go down well when I taught them to my classes, so I sent one of them off to LINEDANCER MAGAZINE. I admit to being surprised and flattered when it was published! That first dance was called TEXAS BLUE and spurred on by that, I wrote some more dances. So far, I've had seven of my dances published in Linedancer Magazine, which may not sound many - but I've only choreographed around 14 in total - so that's a 50% hit rate!! Back in the good old days of linedancing, no dance was overly complicated - dances contained mainly stomps, heels, hooks and maybe the odd shuffle or two. How things have changed! Dances these days are much more sophisticated and dancers are far more demanding. There's also an awful lot of choice out there too, it seems everybody is choreographing dances, so to get noticed is much harder. I received lots of encouragement and feedback on my dances and I like to think that my dances are sympathetically choreographed to the music. I would rather write a dance to a particular track, than choreograph a dance and then look around for a piece of music to dance it to. My most successful dance to date is WHEN I CRY, which got into the TOP TEN dance chart in the UK and was danced (and still is) all around the world in places such as Hawaii, the US, Malaysia, Singapore and Europe. It's certainly a very weird feeling to see a dance you choreographed in your own home, being danced by complete strangers in another country via Youtube! These days I still write line dances, mainly for my own classes but I also post them on all the linedance sites on the internet (what a wonderful thing that is!) and if they are good enough, I hope that other teachers will pick up on them and spread the word! My choreography also now extends to my Jazz, Freestyle and Street dance children's classes - an altogether completely different style of dance, with body, hand and head movements as well as feet! My dance school, Urban Dance Factory, teaches a mix of dance styles: Jazz, Disco, Freestyle, Lyrical and Street dance, so the opportunities for choreography are wide ranging. Most of the dances I choreograph, particularly for the children's shows are Jazz based, but in classes we do lots of Pop, Disco and Street based dances - all of which we choreograph ourselves. You can check out some of my choreography on YouTube under 'steppingoutald' My published line dances - all in Linedancer Magazine - are: TEXAS BLUE UNLOVE ME WHEN I CRY DO THAT TO ME WINNERS & LOSERS DON'T GO BREAKING MY HEART RAVISHING RUBY

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