The choreographic process: responding to a stimulus, forming a choreographic intention, generating and developing movement material through improvisation and selection, and refining the work in rehearsal.

What this dot point is asking

AQA wants you to understand the choreographic process: the journey from a starting idea (the stimulus) to a finished dance. In Component 2 you choreograph a solo or group dance, so you must be able to describe and use this process yourself, and explain it in the written paper.

Stimulus and intention

A clear intention comes first because every later choice (movement, structure, music, staging) should serve it. AQA recognises stimulus types such as visual (a picture, sculpture or photograph), auditory (a piece of music or a sound), kinaesthetic (movement itself, such as a gesture), tactile (a texture or object you handle) and ideational (a concept, theme or word). The same stimulus can lead to very different intentions: a photograph of a crowded station might suggest loneliness in a crowd to one choreographer and the energy of a city to another. Naming the stimulus type and then stating the intention it produced is exactly what the written paper rewards.

Generating and developing material

A motif is a movement or short phrase that captures the intention and can be repeated and varied. Improvisation produces far more material than the dance needs, so the choreographer acts as an editor, keeping only what serves the intention. Developing the selected motifs with devices (changing action, space, dynamics or relationships, and using repetition, contrast and climax) is how a short idea grows into a full, varied yet unified dance.

Refining the work

The final stage is rehearsal and refinement: cleaning timing, sharpening dynamics, fixing transitions and checking that the dance still communicates the intention clearly. This is where good material becomes a finished performance. A common mistake is to treat the process as linear, generate then perform; in practice strong choreographers loop back, improvising new material to fill a weak section, re-selecting, and refining again. The process is a cycle of make, edit and polish.

The professional choreographers in the anthology used recognisable versions of this process. Christopher Bruce drew Shadows from the ideational stimulus of a family living under threat, James Cousins built Within Her Eyes from the kinaesthetic rule that one dancer never touches the floor, and Wayne McGregor developed Infra from the idea of hidden emotion beneath a city. Seeing how a clear stimulus and intention shaped each set work helps you both understand the anthology and apply the same disciplined process to your own choreography in Component 2.