Travis Guerin choreographs to his own music for KC Ballet’s New Moves

Travis Guerin’s usual medium is feet — he’s in his third season dancing with the Kansas City Ballet, and he also choreographs. But sometimes he relies on his hands to produce motion: He writes music for dance.

Guerin’s “Meta” is the latest piece of original music he has composed for dancers he has choreographed himself. It’s one of the works featured in the company’s New Moves program. The annual showcase used to be called Dancers Making Dances, and that’s essentially what it is. KC Ballet members Charles Martin, Anthony Krutzkamp and Ian Poulis are among this year’s choreographers, joining Houston Ballet veteran Ilya Kozadayev and Erin Novak-Lustig of KC’s Seamless Dance Theatre. Guerin answered The Pitch‘s questions by e-mail.

The Pitch: You’ve said you don’t play a live instrument but compose by computer. How do you start writing a piece?

Guerin: I always start with a basic chord progression. I’ll think of the general feeling I want the piece to convey, the environment I want the song to sound like, and fiddle around with various keys and chords until I feel that the general progression of the song sounds the way I like. There’s a lot of guesswork and experimentation here, simply because I don’t have any idea how to actually play music or what keys are “correct” together or what chords sound good next to each other. My best new purchase this year was a MIDI keyboard. It’s really sped up my process, and it makes experimenting and trying new things a lot less tedious and time-consuming. Plus, it’s really fun to actually make music with your hands.

After I have a chord progression … I’ll literally just sit there and try different keys, different accents, same keys with different melody, different keys with the same melody. Then I’ll add in bass lines, heavy percussion … try out some different melodies on top of other melodies. It’s really just a building process.

What are the challenges that come with having so much control?

It can be a bad thing because there’s nobody there to say, “No, Travis, that’s terrible.” So I could make this horrendous song and come up with terrible choreography, and it would just happen, and I would be allowed to do it because it’s all my thing. So I do a lot of self-editing and try to catch things that sound funny or look funny or just don’t work. I also ask my dancers and friends to listen and watch and please, please tell me if anything is just absolutely awful.

How does seeing the way a particular dancer or dancers move to your music, as you rehearse, lead to changes you might make to the music?

I don’t make too many changes to the music once I start choreographing because I built the music with certain aspects of the choreography in mind. I’ll have a basic structure of the dance when creating the music, so there is a natural flow and connection between the two — like, this phrase of music is a group section, there’s a pas de deux, this part has three couples, etc. This helps me to have a clearer concept of the piece as a whole installation, rather than making a random cool song and then having to make a random cool dance to go with it.

My favorite part of the whole process is definitely working with the dancers. Because I’ve had all these ideas and visualizations in my head the whole time, the absolute best part is seeing it all come together in real life in front of you for the first time. Sometimes the dancers laugh at me because if something works out the way I envisioned, I get so excited that I dance around like a little kid, but it really is spectacular, seeing your friends enjoying dancing something you created to music you composed. It’s pretty incredible. That moment is why I do this whole thing.