"I'm not a good choreographer: I can't remember what I put down"
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O’Connor’s wry confession collapses the gap between inspiration and craft. A great choreographer must be an architect of memory: recording, structuring, and teaching a repeatable map of movement. A great performer can dazzle with instinct, improvisation, and sheer presence. By admitting he “can’t remember what I put down,” he draws a playful line between kinetic genius in the moment and the disciplined stewardship required to shape that moment for others.
The remark celebrates spontaneity while honoring the hidden labor of dance. Choreography is not only invention; it is documentation, transmission, and consistency across bodies, casts, and nights. Eight shows a week demands recall, not just brilliance. Forgetting disrupts the chain that turns a spark into a repertoire. O’Connor’s humor implicitly praises the assistants, dance captains, notators, and video archivists who stabilize what might otherwise evaporate after applause.
There’s also a deeper meditation on embodiment. Dance lives inside the body’s memory. If the body is a canvas, then choreography is a set of brushstrokes that must be reproducible. O’Connor’s persona, athletic, improvisatory, playfully chaotic, thrived on the energy of the present tense. The movement erupts, electrifies, and then disappears. The inability to “remember what I put down” becomes an artist’s acknowledgement that the truest expression sometimes resists codification.
The line hints at aging and humility. Memory, like muscle, shifts over time, and the wise performer knows when to lean on collaborators who can hold the blueprint. It also offers a broader artistic truth: many creators produce their finest work when they stop narrating it to themselves. Self-conscious archiving can throttle the very impulse that makes the work alive.
Ultimately, the confession reframes mastery. Not every artist must be a keeper of the canon. Some ignite the stage and trust others to bottle the flame. The art survives through a pact between spark and structure, ecstasy and notation, the unforgettable moment and the people who remember.
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