Creating a Character on Stage
Iana performing with a live band in Cairo, Egypt.
Dance is so much more than just a sequence of movements. 👉It’s first of all about the message, emotion, and state you wanna share with your audience. In order to do that you need to work on the character of your choreography, not just its technique.
Creating a character on stage is a skill. A skill that can be learnt, and endlessly improved. It’s the skill (or rather a set of skills) that allows you to transport your audience AND yourself into a particular state.☝️
When you are a dance student, usually your emotional dance vocabulary is limited to: smile when it’s a happy song, don’t smile when it’s a sad song. 😄😟But in order to put together a really professional show it’s not enough to just smile/not smile. How about all those nuanced emotions: playful, excited, silly, tender, romantic, heartbroken, nostalgic, frustrated, angry?…
Someone will say it’s about acting on stage. Yes, but I would clarify further: it’s about creating, embodying and translating a character on stage. ✅ Creating means fully understanding what’s your message. ✅ Embodying means really feeling it (not imitating/pretending/or choosing which movements fits, but REALLY FEELING it). And ✅ translating is using your emotional dance vocabulary to express what you feel. And this last part has nothing to do with particular gestures, or facial expressions. 💁♀️It’s first of all knowing how to project your energy accordingly. Movements and gestures will follow naturally.
How do you think we can expand and train our emotional dance vocabulary?🤔 And is it possible at all?
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About Iana
Iana Komarnytska is a professional dancer, teacher, choreographer, and passionate content creator helping dancers navigate their dance lives.
She is a graduate from the professional dance program at York University (Canada), host of the Belly Dance Life podcast, creator of the Iana Dance Club, author of numerous articles, and winner of Star Bellydancer Canada 2014 among other international competitions.
Along with belly dance, Iana performs and teaches Persian Classical and Turkish Romani dancing. She is the first choreographer to start using Triple Isis wings, and since 2012 this is one of her style signatures.
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