Monday, November 2, 1998
			Choreographer Marjorie Mussman spent a week working with students and faculty in the dance department last month as a Center for Humanities and Arts visiting artist. She created a dance for the UGA Ballet Ensemble to perform at their next concert and, as the culmination of the week’s activities, gave a lecture about choreography in which the elements of the new dance, demonstrated by student-dancers, served as illustration. Some excerpts: “This dance is a theme with variations, essentially contemporary modern off-balance movement on point shoes--it has to be danced by very good dancers! . . . I wanted to see how far I could take a classical ballet line before it turned into something else, before it had to go elsewhere, before it wasn’t classical ballet any longer. . . . The dancers are not so much off-balance as counter-balanced; they’re zigzags instead of pillars. . . . “One of the most enjoyable things about choreographing is collaborating with your dancers. You show a dancer the move you want, and they do it, and do it better than what you said. . . . “Your audience’s eyes need refreshment--information overload is what exhausts you. If an audience has too much chaos they start to get edgy. Chaos and order, chaos and order--you need both. That’s what life is all about.” And finally, advice based on choreography but applicable to any form of creation: “Sometimes you have to wait for lightning to strike. And sometimes you have to realize that you have other options, that you don’t have to accept the first thing you come up with.”
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