The Beauty of Choreographing in Dara Capley’s Eyes
- womenschoreography
- Mar 28
- 5 min read
By Lily Park
“Oh, this is what I have been working towards,” Dara Capley, a multiple time choreographer and dancer for Choreography Project, exclaimed, recalling how she felt when she first choreographed for the 2019 project. This experience had been Capley’s first time ever choreographing, and when I spoke with her, she fondly recalled how formative this opportunity was for her: “It’s so hard to find opportunities as a choreographer if you have not done it yet, which means you’re stuck in this catch of ‘I’m not allowed to try this simply because I haven’t done it’...so this first chance to choreograph was a huge deal for me.”
Until this moment, Capley always viewed choreographing as a more distant—and perhaps somewhat unattainable—goal. She grew up in Florida training full-time in classical ballet, taking her middle and high school classes online in the hours she did not spend dancing. After she finished her schooling, she spent her early twenties dancing in a few professional ballet companies before deciding to participate as a dancer in Choreography Project’s first project. Despite her background’s heavy focus on classical ballet, as Capley’s career progressed, she became more sure of her curiosity in experimenting and choreographing with a more contemporary style of dance.
“I was really interested in choreographing when I was a teenager, but I didn’t know how to get from dancer to choreographer. So I kind of gave up on that, or just didn’t put it at the forefront of my mind because I figured I had to focus on my career as a dancer first,” Capley explained. “As a dancer, I was always incredibly inspired by musicality and how to highlight different aspects of music. I just wanted to show people how music looks in my head; when I hear music I always see moving shapes and colors, so I think I always knew that I was really wanting to express something.” Luckily, when Capley first danced with Choreography Project, the small, low stakes nature of this newly founded organization in combination with the community’s genuine support and positivity encouraged her to apply as a choreographer for the 2019 project. Thus, with two dancers she brought in, a small amount of knowledge she recalled from past composition workshops, and Choreography Project’s willingness to provide resources and support, Capley managed to successfully craft her first piece, opening the door to her now abundant choreography career. “That first opportunity really influenced me. Directors in attendance at the show then hired me, I had a professional-looking video of my own choreography, and that three-week time frame to make my work, even though it’s daunting, was roughly the amount of time a company would have commissioned me for…it was all super important for my career.”
Capley returned to Choreography Project as a more experienced choreographer in 2024 with her piece Strange Attractors. This dance, which Capley hopes to transform into a larger series of similar pieces in the future, uses three dancers to demonstrate the commercial sexualization of women in society. The piece started with her fascination with real life Strange attractors, the plotting systems or fractal patterns that mathematicians use to make palpable predictions in chaos theory in combination with the human nature of attraction. Thus, she began to select music and create movement that allowed her the ability to pose the questions she had surrounding this topic, such as Why are we attracted to the things we are attracted to? or Are attractions intrinsic or learned?
Capley then worked with the wide support system of Choreography Project to fine tune the presentation of her piece, making every minute detail another element that enhanced the complexity of her message. The lighting, for example, closely matches the theme of the piece; it transitions from a dark, neon brilliancy to a soft, neutral glow when the dancers shift from the sharp movement that expresses their hypersexuality to the soft, instinctual movement that demonstrates the more humane, natural exploration of their bodies. “To me, lighting can deepen what you’re saying so much, so I had a lot of specific ideas of what I wanted. It was a real gift to have been given the chance to work very closely with the lighting designer,” Capley noted when discussing her lighting choices. “Similarly, I was able to design the costuming; I knew I wanted this hyper-feminized look, and as they moved out of this performative part of the piece, I wanted to see the vulnerability of physically undressing, and then have them remain in a simple costume that showed them for who they really were as people.” Even the choreography itself would alter each night to further convey the meaning of the piece, Capley revealed: “if the piece is about chaos, I can’t choreograph every little part of it without losing the message.” Thus, in the middle of the piece, a person comes on and hands the dancers a piece of paper that contains an image of a fractal pattern and prompts the dancers to improvise choreography by replicating the image with their own bodies. With this choice, Capley explained, she could keep the integrity of the confusion she was trying to convey.
These small details that Capley created with the freedom that Choreography Project offered all contributed to the powerful message that, as Capley had hoped, eventually pushed audience members to consider the meaning behind her piece. “My mentor, Marissa Molinar, talks about how good feedback is just as important as bad feedback, because good feedback helps you find the people that are actually interested in what you want to say, and it’s true; it was so exciting to be able to connect with the audience members who really wanted to talk with me about my work,” she admitted. The response she received from her piece, no matter its contents, felt like a true reward for the amount of effort she had put into every aspect of the piece’s making.
Since 2019, Capley has continued to work with Choreography Project, and when I asked her to explain why she has returned to the organization numerous times, she explained that their philosophy is what drives her to continue supporting them and entrusting them to help her tell these stories that matter deeply to her. Most obviously, the organization gave Capley her first shot at choreography, and since then, has continued to give her opportunities, as well as any support she might need, to help her expand her career. Above all, however, being personally interested in social justice, Capley believes that the organization’s mission to showcase under-represented choreographers and stories best aligns with her own values as a person, as well as the messages she shares within her choreography. “I really feel that a lot of the art, specifically the dance, that we see today does not represent the actual population, nor the actual tastes and interests of the people. Until we diversify who gets to tell stories and who gets to share their vision, art will just continue to die, because people will stop being interested.” With initiatives like that of Choreography Project, Capley believes, art just might be able to persist.