Crafting Questions

Through the simple act of crafting questions for this blog project over the past four years, my writing skills have definitely improved. I feel that I have built more language around dance and have a wider array of options at my fingertips to use for a variety of writing tasks.

On average, for each artist that writes a blog profile, I send him/her 12-15 questions to answer. Some questions are logistical – How would you describe the first five years after graduating college? Others are broader and open ended – What keeps you believing in modern dance in 2015? 

Today, as an exercise, I encourage you to develop some questions. 

1. Start with yourself.

Imagine that you are going to be interviewed for your local dance newspaper or main dance website. What questions might they ask you? What stories do you hope to share? What is unique to you – your training, path, current projects? See if you can create a list of 8-15 questions that vary from being very concrete and detail-oriented to those questions that go deeper and ask about our philosophy around dancemaking, performance, accessibility, voice, and more.

2. Select an artist in the community.

Imagine that you get the opportunity to interview an artist in your community that you greatly admire and are curious about. Given the chance, what do you want to ask him/her? What do you want to learn? See if you can create a list of 8-15 questions for this particular person as well. 

3. Related to questions, check out Writing Exercise #5 from a few months ago.

4. If you have questions you would like to see me asking more artists as part of the artist profiles on the blog, please email me! randalldanceprojects@gmail.com 

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