How Making A Dance Is and Is Not Exactly Like Writing A Novel

Guest post written by author Andrew Simonet
Andrew Simonet is a choreographer and writer in Philadelphia. His first novel, Wilder, published in 2018. He co-directed Headlong Dance Theater for twenty years and founded Artists U, an incubator for helping artists make sustainable lives. He lives in West Philadelphia with his wife, Elizabeth, and their two sons, Jesse Tiger and Nico Wolf. A Night Twice As Long releases on June 1st 2021.

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I ran a dance company for 20 years, Headlong Dance Theater. We made experimental stuff, often involving participation and immersion. You can see CELL here, a performance experience for one audience member at a time guided by your cell phone, and a twitchy duet from MORE here.

Meanwhile, I started writing fiction, quietly and on the side. Eventually, I left Headlong to focus on writing. Friends and colleagues were flummoxed: Is your novel at least about dance? Um, no. For me, the connections between writing and dancing are not on the surface, but deep down. Like growing apples versus pineapples, the products and climate are different, but the fundamentals of soil, sun, and season remain.

So here are my highly personal, still evolving, and often painfully obvious observations—for me, the obvious ones are most interesting—of how making a dance is and is not exactly like writing a novel.

Physically and logistically, the processes are so, so different. Dance making is social, sometimes crowded. You get to/have to create within a group dynamic. Collaborators lift and sustain me when I struggle; they also derail and distract me. A dance friend asked me what writing was like. I said: “Learning to be alone, two hours at a time.” Studio time in dance is often the most interactive part of my day. A novelist’s studio time is monastic, solitary.

Dances takes weeks or months to create. Novels take years, plural. I worked on my first (still unpublished) novel for seven years, a period in which my son went from not existing to first grade.

Dances usually premiere at the climax of the process. The rehearsal period concludes with the first performance. Novels premiere years after the writing is finished. By the time people are reading my novel, it is, for me, in the past, and this time-shift disconnects me from my audience. I’m still figuring out how to be in the same time zone as my readers.

What are the hurdles? To make a dance, you need studio space, dancers, a rehearsal schedule, and—likely—money for all of that. Once you’re at rehearsal, you need to tune the group dynamic, generate enthusiasm for the project, and warm everybody up. Writing doesn’t have big external hurdles. At any moment, if I have the time, I can sit down and write. The scarier way to say that is: All the barriers to writing are internal. I think this is partly why there is such an elaborate discourse around how goddamn hard it is to write.

“Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.” Olin Miller

“Writing. Opening a vein in your wrist with a spoon.” Ann-Marie MacDonald

Well. I respect all artistic struggle. But I was in a rehearsal when a dancer ruptured her achilles tendon. It sounded like a gunshot. Writers could ease up on the bodily harm metaphors.

Writing is stable; dance isn’t. A sentence I write will be the same tomorrow, and next month, and three years from now. If I choreograph a duet, it may look quite different tomorrow. Trying to recover that duet a year from now—we squint at video and search our muscle memory—often feels like a second process of creation. Bodies change, dancers forget, and the glorious specificity of movement can shift over time. Every dance company has an argument settler—yes, I see you, Niki C.—the dancer who knows definitively that the hips start to the left. Dance is lived, ephemeral, and changes as our bodies change. That can be beautiful and frustrating. Writing endures and preserves, which can also be beautiful and frustrating.

The delivery systems are different. Novels are consumed individually. Dances are watched in groups. There’s a consensus energy in an audience, shared and infectious. It can inspire powerful feelings of connection or the coercive sense that everyone’s laughing so I should laugh, too. A reader is a society of one, unaccountable to the crowd.

Dance time is artist-controlled; viewers are stuck there until it’s over. Reading time is audience-controlled; readers can put a novel down, reread sections, skip to the end, or skim, all on their own time. (Thanks to dancemaker Meg Fry for this insight.) I think this is why, when I invite people to a dance performance, they often ask how long it will be. That hurts. I invite you to this glorious art form I’ve committed decades to, and you just want to know: When will it end? And while dances can be long, novels are longer, wildly long, requiring 10 hours or more of attention. Asking someone to read my novel is like asking them to drive to Quebec.

I was literally in the room with every person who saw my dances. I felt the laughter and lack of laughter, the ebb and flow of attention. I wish I could be in the room while someone reads my entire novel. That’s creepy, a writer friend said. Don’t do that. I have sat next to my wife as she reads my drafts, and every she time giggles or sighs, I search for the sentence that provoked it, a performer desperate for audience feedback.

People often tell me: “I don’t understand dance.” Much of my work as a choreographer was pushing past this idea that you need special information to watch choreography. If you are a body, you already have everything you need to understand dance. No one has yet said to me: “I don’t understand stories.”

Novelist is a semi-respected profession, dancer less so. Say that you’re a dancer, and certain eyebrows raise. “Are you…” No, I’m not a stripper, though I’ve known many gifted dancers who are. My sister lied for years, telling people I was an actor. I think she’s happier now saying novelist.

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Can you make it snow? An author writes “Snow began falling in wet clumps,” and it does, instantly, indisputably. If you want snow during your dance, it’s a considerable pain in the ass. You need a bunch of money and labor, every night you’ll set it up and clean it up, and it still won’t be as convincing as six words on a page. Writers are omnipotent. We time travel, voice the interior thoughts of a character, and effortlessly conjure earthquakes and invasions and visits from angels. Dance is heavy, gravity-bound, and real-time. It’s nonfiction: Everything that happens in a dance must be actually executed in the moment by real people.

Everyone’s writing a novel. When I tell people, “I choreograph dances,” almost no one says: Gosh, there’s this dance I’ve been working on for five years, and I wonder if you’d take a look at it. When I say I write, an astonishing number of people talk about their in-progress novel or long-planned memoir. I love that people write and dream of writing. Everyone should. Making art is almost always more powerful than consuming it. More of us could make dances, too.

Publishing is an art form and an industry. Dance is mostly an art form. The craft of choreography gets little mainstream attention, and that honestly can be a relief. Ask a culturally interested people to name five important dances of the last century, and most will draw a blank. Dance artists bemoan this, but it also makes space for experimentation and community without commercial pressures. There are gatekeepers in dance—presenters and funders—but they never revise your choreography. Agents and editors walk directly into my novels and make them different, ostensibly better. That would be beyond unthinkable in the dance world.

Dance is passed body to body. There is no widely used system for transcribing movement. I cannot study the dances of Isadora Duncan except by studying with the dancers who studied with the dancers who studied with Isadora. While video has changed things somewhat, choreography learned from video struggles to achieve artistic depth. Dance is an oral tradition, resistant to commodification and preservation, and, in contrast to literature, to the idea of a Canon.

Some smaller points: Writers need this thing called “exercise.” Should I go running? How does that even work? When you are used to dance, exercise feels contrived and less than fully nourishing, like eating an energy bar.

Novelists work in the same medium (writing) as their critics. Which is awkward, rivalrous, and entertaining.

As an author, I’ve been asked to proofread college application essays, write recommendations in someone else’s voice, and evaluate how “publishable” someone’s Western novel is. As a dancer, I was asked for stretches, chiropractor recommendations, and help with wedding “first dances,” literally the only moment most people ever need choreography.

Writing careers last longer.

Dancers have better parties.

The similarities between my writing and dance making are in the craft, the discovery of a world—it often feels like discovery, not invention—and its gradual refinement. I flex the same imaginative muscles at my writing desk and my dance studio.

First: Rhythm is everything. Novels, like dances, are time-based and time-driven. For me, it’s all song and flow. I listen for the breath of sentences and bodies, rhythms of speech, of gesture and punctuation, of line breaks and stillness. Changing the rhythm, interrupting a flow, is for me the captivating secret language of art. Story events are, materially, breaks in rhythm.

Habits, habits, habits. I took my first dance class at age nineteen, and I was flabbergasted. I did not know where my body was in space. Raise your arm but keep your shoulder down. What? Those are different things? Reading my writing, especially out loud, I hear my ruts, my shortcuts and lazy go-tos. Dance and writing demand and reward attention, knowing when to honor and when to refine my habits of body and mind.

Pretty is the enemy of beautiful. I don’t get to beautiful by going through pretty. This can be trickier to practice in dance, because asking dancers to be unpretty often goes against their training and longings.

Dance is bodies (nouns) doing things (verbs). I think of nouns and verbs as prime numbers of language, and adjectives and adverbs as multiples of those primes. One way I look at a story: It’s people doing stuff. It’s nouns verbing.

No redundancy. Salt helps me taste the sweet. If I set a slow, mournful dance phrase to slow, mournful music, it gets muddied by the doubling. Set it to an upbeat disco track, and the sorrow deepens. Perpendicularity gives dimension.

My dances and my novels have a world, a sense of Here. I have to be awake and patient—the world emerges on its own timeframe—and, when it arrives, decisive. Once I see the world, I have to commit to it, which means cutting much—maybe most—of what I have made so far, even the “good” stuff. Which brings me to:

Cut. Cut everything. Dance and writing are homeopathic; the imprinted memory of deleted material lingers. Most of my editing process is deletion. One trick I learned from bonsai: I would be trimming around some branch, trying to highlight it, and then I’d realize: Wait, that branch is the thing I need to cut. Cut it. Cut everything.

Most of the material I create will not appear in the final work. I call it compost, knowing that it feeds the ecology of the piece.

I work with or without momentum. The gift of a rehearsal schedule is getting back in the studio whether or not I feel inspired. Writing makes me only accountable to myself, and the risk is that I will wait for inspiration. I (aim to) write daily.

I must get lost. Before a piece solidifies, I lose my way. I have to push away from shore, get lost before I get found. So when I reach a moment when my dance or novel seems entirely off course, I know I am on the right path.

Showing the work is always the same. It’s ridiculously embarrassing. It’s thrilling and nerve-wracking and cathartic and necessary. I feel seen in both senses: beheld by fellow humans and exposed before them. I look forward to launching my novel A Night Twice as Long the way I look forward to a summer thunderstorm. Bring on the release of energy, the collision, the turbulence. It’s time.