How to Make a Dance for a Song: Choreography Step by Step

Everything starts with the track. Superprof's guide to making dance routines says the music needs to speak to you, mean something and make you feel: you can't just pick some music out of a hat. For a first dance, go for a moderate tempo and a song you know well; Fred Astaire Dance Studio of Durham, a ballroom school in North Carolina, suggests a familiar song with a clear drum, bass or piano line, so the beat is easy to pick out. Before you move, listen to it several times in a row without dancing, to spot the musical phrases, the big moments and the silences: the Durham school tells beginners to stay still for the first listen, and Superprof says you need to know the music off by heart before you dance to it.

Tempo is measured in beats per minute (BPM), the unit music sequencers and DJs work with, whereas classical scores customarily describe it in words, usually Italian ones such as Allegro or Andante, as Wikipedia's article on tempo explains. Wikipedia puts house music, in its most typical form, at 120 to 130 BPM, and drum and bass usually at 160 to 180. This arithmetic comes in handy later: at 120 BPM there are two beats every second, so one beat lasts half a second and an 8-count lasts 4 seconds; a 3-minute song therefore contains 360 beats, or 45 eights. The faster the tempo, the less time each move gets, and the shorter any travelling needs to be.

Next, cut the track to the length you need with audio editing software. Cut at the start of a musical phrase, on a "1", never in the middle of an eight, and go for a clean ending on a strong beat rather than a fade-out that trails off while the group holds its final pose. Finally, keep the exact file you've cut and make sure everyone has that same file: if the version changes along the way, the counts shift and the whole group has to relearn its cues.

In dance, you count music in groups of eight beats, "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8", then start again. Fred Astaire Dance Studio of Durham explains that dance teachers often count in sets of eight because two bars make a useful phrase, and that the 8-count is common in group classes; the waltz, whose music the school says is usually grouped in threes ("ONE, two, three"), is the obvious exception. An 8-count covers two bars of 4/4, the time signature many popular songs are felt in, and the same school notes that the first beat, the downbeat, often feels stronger than the beats around it. The "1" is where the phrase starts again, often marked by a voice or an instrument coming in.

Off-beats are counted as "and": "1 and 2 and 3 and…". The Durham school has beginners match each step to a count, saying the numbers out loud as they shift their weight on each beat, and the same habit is what keeps a group together: when every move is tied to the same count, everyone lands at the same time. When you start the music or go again from a section, count the group in with "five, six, seven, eight": it tells everyone the next eight is about to begin. Counting out loud while you dance, as the school recommends, locks the structure into your head: everybody goes on the 1.

Write the counts down from the very start. The simplest tool is a count sheet: one row per eight, numbered (first eight, second eight…), with the part of the music beside it (intro, verse, chorus) and the moves in a few words. Superprof's guide shows what notes on a song's structure should look like: "Intro: 2 x 8 beats. Verse 1: 4 x 8 beats. Chorus: 2 x 8 beats", and so on. At exam level, keeping a record is compulsory: WJEC, the Welsh exam board, has its GCSE Dance candidates produce a reflective log of their choreographic process, in whatever format they like; from one rehearsal to the next, photos or a notebook will do. Without a record, a dance gets reinvented at every rehearsal.

Most songs alternate between verses and choruses. Wikipedia's article on song structure explains that when the music of a verse comes back, it almost always gets a new set of lyrics, whereas the chorus usually keeps the same lyrics every time its music returns. It gives the most common format in modern popular music as intro, verse, pre-chorus, chorus, verse, pre-chorus, chorus, bridge and chorus, with an optional outro, and says the bridge is there to break up the song's repetitive pattern; Superprof also tells you to analyse this structure before you start choreographing. Mark these parts on your count sheet: how many eights for the intro, for each verse, for the chorus. That's the skeleton of your dance.

Then build the dance on that structure. A chorus that keeps coming back calls for the same phrase of movement each time: the audience recognises it, and the dancers learn it once for all three choruses. The verses leave room for variations, a small-group section or a change of formation; the bridge is the place for a surprise or a contrast. The GCSE Dance specification published by the English exam board AQA names these forms: binary (AB), ternary (ABA), rondo, where an A section keeps coming back between different sections, and narrative, where the dance tells a story. WJEC's specification even likens the rondo to a chorus in a song.

Take care over the beginning and the ending: they're the two moments the audience remembers. TVO Learn, the online learning service of Ontario's public educational broadcaster, gives primary pupils a whole lesson on beginnings and endings, with simple strategies: enter or exit from off stage, freeze, take a bow, have a moment of silence, start and end in the same position. For the opening, ask yourself three questions: where (already on stage or coming in from the wings), who (the whole group, small groups, one dancer after another) and how (the same actions or different ones, at the same speed or not). The same goes for the ending: standing still on stage, gathered together, on the floor, or exiting one by one. A clean, held final pose works better than a vague exit.

A movement phrase is a sequence of moves that forms a unit, often one or two eights long. Start with a short motif that carries the idea of the dance: an arm gesture, a step, a particular way of shifting your weight. AQA's GCSE specification lists "motif and development" first among its choreographic devices (a motif, then ways of developing it), and WJEC defines a motif as a distinctive, recurring gesture or series of movements that provides a theme or unifying idea. To find your moves, start from the music (an accent calls for a sharp gesture, a sustained sound for a smooth one), a word, an image, or an everyday gesture you turn into something new; AQA's GCSE students, for example, work from a stimulus such as a poem or a painting.

Then develop the motif with choreographic devices. WJEC's GCSE Dance specification lists some twenty choreographic devices and a dozen structural ones, including repetition (repeating a movement or a phrase), retrograde (reversing the order of a sequence), inversion (performing a movement laterally or upside down), contrast (big and small, fast and slow), accumulation (movement 1, then 1 and 2, then 1, 2 and 3), change of levels (the same action performed low, middle or high), fragmentation (using only part of the motif), unison (the same movement at the same time across the group) and canon (the parts performed in succession, overlapping one another). One 8-count motif can give you several phrases without inventing a single new step.

Stick to phrases your group can actually dance. A simple dance repeats more than it invents: two or three well-chosen phrases, repeated and varied, are often enough for a first routine. Dance each phrase yourself to the music before you teach it, count it out loud and write it down on your count sheet, eight by eight. If a section doesn't land cleanly on the counts, simplify it straight away: it's much harder to fix once the whole group has learned it.

Once the phrases are written, decide where everyone dances them. A formation is where all the dancers stand at a given moment: a line, two staggered lines, a V, a diagonal, a circle, small groups. Change formation when the music moves into a new section, not at random: a new verse, the start of the chorus or the bridge are natural moments. The guide to creating dance formations covers the common shapes and how to choose them for the number of dancers you have.

Placement also makes the dance easier to read. AQA's specification counts "manipulation of number", playing with how many dancers are moving, among its choreographic devices, and WJEC describes accumulation as adding movements and/or dancers into the action: a chorus danced in unison by the whole group hits harder after a verse danced by three. Put your most confident dancers where the eye naturally goes, centre and front, and stagger the rows so the second line can be seen through the gaps in the first.

Every change of formation is a pathway you count, just like a step. Give it an exact number of counts, one eight for instance, and a route for each dancer, making sure no two pathways cross the same spot at the same moment. The simplest transitions keep the dancers in the same order; those that reshuffle them need more rehearsal. On your plan, note for each formation the count it must be in place by: that marker is what gets the group arriving together.

Teach the dance in chunks. West End in Schools, a London theatre-in-education company that runs dance workshops in primary schools, describes the method in its guide to teaching dance: break the routine into small, manageable chunks, one phrase at a time, work on direction and position without the music if need be, then add the music and go over the whole sequence again and again, like a song on loop. Show each eight slowly first, counting and without music, then with the music. If you demonstrate facing the group, mirror the moves and say so, or half your dancers will go the wrong way. So that everyone can go over their spot at home, it's easier to share the choreography with your whole troupe than to copy out plans by hand.

Let the dancers "mark" while they're learning, that is, run through the moves in a smaller, lighter version, without jumping or going all out. A study from the University of California, Santa Cruz, published in the journal Psychological Science and reported by Dance Informa magazine, had 38 advanced ballet students learn two routines, one practised at performance speed and the other by marking: judges scored the dancers higher on the routine they had marked, finding those performances more seamless and the sequences more fluid. The authors see marking as a way to relieve cognitive load, not just to save energy. Save full-out dancing for the sections that are already secure.

Before the show, dance the whole piece from start to finish without stopping. That's the run-through, which the Cambridge Dictionary defines as performing something from beginning to end in order to practise it. Do it without an audience, to time the piece, check the coordination and test the spacing. Note what goes wrong, then clean: go back over the sections where the group isn't together, count by count, checking that everyone has the same arm angle and the same focus on the same count. Finish on the actual stage, so you can readjust the distances.

Stancz is a choreography app for planning where dancers stand: you place them on a stage drawn to scale, chain formations, and the transitions between formations are animated to your music, with a 2D top view, a 3D view and a view from the audience, the Spectator view. It runs in the browser of a computer, PC or Mac, with nothing to install, and as apps for iPhone, iPad and Android, with the same account everywhere. Free use covers up to 3 choreographies with 4 formations per choreography, and a paid subscription exists beyond that. The app includes 19 presets, ready-made shapes that adapt to the number of dancers, and a single choreography can hold up to 500 dancers.

In the method set out in this guide, it comes in at the music, placement and teaching stages. You import your track, as an MP3 or a WAV file: its waveform becomes the timeline. "Tap tempo (BPM)" measures the BPM, and "Snap formations to the beat" lines formation lengths up with the beats. You create one formation per section of the music, rename it ("Verse 1", "Chorus") and drag its edge to set its length; on playback, the dancers glide from one formation to the next, and a pathway that's too long or two dancers crossing paths show up straight away. To pass it on, you share the choreography read-only, including on the free plan, and "Highlight me" picks out each dancer's own dot.

What Stancz doesn't do, plainly: it doesn't write the steps for you. There's no artificial intelligence in it inventing dances; the moves, the counts and the phrases stay in your count sheet, your notebook and your body, and the app only deals with space and time, that is, who is where, and when. There is no PDF export, several people can't edit at the same time, and it doesn't manage a dance school (enrolments, timetables, payments).