How To: Choreograph a Musical - Part 1
The choreography has an impact on all of your technical marks, as well as several of the artistic marks so it’s important to get it right!
The first step in creating a musical is to create your floorplan. This is done by looking at your strengths and weaknesses and combining required and non-required movements in such a way that your strengths are shown off to the judge and your weaknesses are hidden. For example, if you have very straight simple changes you could ride them on the centreline which shows the judge at C just how straight you are. If you have a poor medium walk you could do this walking directly away from the judge, or at the far end of the arena so that it’s more difficult for the judge to tell that the walk isn’t correct.
You want to be as creative as possible, as well as taking sensible risks in order to get a good mark for your choreography. I would argue that the choreography is even more important than the music, as it has a huge impact on your technical score, as well as accounting for marks in the artistic score. You can create the choreography yourself or get a professional to do it. I have a real passion for creating floorplans, so feel free to get in touch if you’d like your choreography reviewed or a new floorplan created.
A big consideration when designing the choregraphy is the Degree of Difficulty mark. This looks at the number of well calculated risks that you take. If you ride something very difficult, but mess it up your mark will go down, not up, so make sure that you only include things that you can do really well. You are better off having a simple floorplan that is executed very well, than a difficult pattern that is executed poorly. It can also be wise to repeat what you’re using for your difficulty mark in an easier location if it’s a compulsory movement e.g. you could ride tempi changes on a curved line to improve your degree of difficulty and also do them on a diagonal/other straight line to ensure that you get a good technical score for that movement. Riding just one very difficult movement is often not enough to give a great score for degree of difficulty – you need to be able to show a number of difficult movements (or difficult transitions or combinations of movements) in order to get a high degree of difficulty score.
Once you have your floorplan sorted you need to make sure that it’s the right length (this varies for different countries, feel free to get in touch with me if you’re unsure). You may need to adjust your choreography to make it shorter or longer depending on the timing. The time is taken from the move off from your first halt until your final halt and does not include the time taken to enter the arena.
Happy creating!
Nicole x
