Category: Dance

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Live audience

Last week, I had a chance to photograph the first live-audience performance of my daughter’s dance company in more than two years. In my role as a photographer, I’ve always been lucky to have a behind-the-curtains insight into how the incredible performance pieces that other parents can see only at the year-end shows take shape. The amount of work that the dancers and the teachers put into it is simply astonishing. When I first saw it ten years ago, even though I knew next to nothing about dance as an art form, I immediately sensed by the level of work ethics and dedication that even the very young dancers were demonstrating that this was something that simply could not be faked. At that point, I somehow realized that I wanted my daughter to experience that when she would be old enough. It was a world from which one could obviously learn a lot. Fortunately, she has been keen to dance, even from the earliest age.

It was therefore ironic and quite disappointing that this year in particular, when everybody was so looking forward to the first live-audience show since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, my daughter had to sit the performance out. Late last year, she suffered a growth-related injury to both of her knees, which forced her to take a break from dance for the rest of the season. To say the least, it has been quite hard for her to process. Still, she received a boost of positive emotions when she visited her teammates backstage to wish them luck backstage before the show. I am not sure if the traditional wishing of breaking legs was involved; it it was, it must have been almost too funny.

From my side, it is once again fascinating to see through my photos the incredible progress from the training sessions, where everyone was still waring masks, and where the kinks in the choreography were still being ironed out, to the finished performance pieces of the live show. I think we are all looking forward to more of those, once things hopefully return to a more normal state, both at the personal and the community levels.

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Intermittent reinforcement

Jump

I’ve been working on the photos from the year-end show of my daughter’s dance school. Processing thousands of photos that were all taken within two days of each other can be really boring rather monotonous. But coming across images like this, which I forgot I took, every now and then is what makes me want to keep going. “Every now and then” is the key point.

Something similar happens in golf, when I mostly play very poorly rather unremarkably but sometimes get to the green in one stroke. It doesn’t happen often at all, and that’s what makes me want to keep playing.

In dog training, this is called intermittent reinforcement. When a puppy has learned a trick or a command, he is no longer getting a cookie every time, but only once in a while, at random intervals. This makes him want to work and makes the learned skill more reliable.

Similarly, when I manage to capture a cool image, that’s an automatic “Good boy!” signal to me as a photographer. Hopefully, this motivation translates to more practice and, eventually, to some kind of qualitative change.

Anchors aweigh

Hip Hop

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Ballet bun

Ballet

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been learning quite a bit about dance through my involvement in dance photography at my daughter’s dance school. Few weeks ago, I was shooting a demo video on how to make a ballet bun ahead of the year-end show. I realized that stage hairstyling is one of the skills that I never thought I’d ever be interested in. Yet nowadays, because of my daughter, ballet bun-making is quite high on my list of essential things to master – for those days when mom cannot make it to practice.

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Collective experience

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book “Flow” is possibly the most enjoyable non-fiction book I’ve read. It makes perfect sense, of course, because the book is about optimal experiences. As I’ve been reading it, I notice the concepts described there everywhere around me. For example, one of the theses is that for an activity to be enjoyable it needs to be autotelic, i.e. deriving the meaning from itself. Ultimately, it all comes down to being present, which means paying close attention to whatever one is doing at the moment. Apparently, it helps if we have heightened expectations of the experience and also if large groups of people participate in the same activity. Csikszentmihalyi gives an example of live music performances, and I think that any kind of group activity or event works in a similar way to focus our attention. I see it regularly at my own kendo practices, tournaments and gradings. It is often difficult for me to convince myself to go, but it is seldom a question whether it was worth it once I am there.

Most recently, I saw an example of this effect last Saturday. I was taking photos of a rehearsal of the Christmas parade routine that will be performed by my daughter’s dance school next weekend. From an objective point of view, taking part in the parade should be a miserable experience. Last year, for example, it was pouring cold rain all through the event, and there is every indication that the weather could be the same this year. The rehearsal itself is also tough – more than 150 people cramped together in a dance studio for more than an hour. Yet, the dancers evidently have been having tremendous fun. My photo gallery of the last year’s parade is the most visited of the entire school year coverage. The camaraderie between the different age groups is amazing to witness. My daughter was eager to be part of the parade crew just for the experience of spending time next to the older dancers, whom she admires, and doing something together. I also cannot help but feel lucky that I have an opportunity to have an insider’s look at this collective experience and also to contribute to it by attempting to capture the elusive atmosphere of “flow”. An important part of any experience is our recollection of it, and photos not only capture memories, but actually shape them.

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Focus

One of the necessary conditions for achieving a flow state (when you are so engrossed in an activity that you lose a sense of time, and the challenges you face seem to be perfectly matched by your skill level at any given moment) is the ability to focus on the task at hand. This is easier said than done, and both the ability of the individual and the nature of the activity play significant roles. Apparently, people who are good at concentrating their attention are able to restrict the input of external information that they are processing. In other words, they can filter out everything that is not relevant to the activity. This enables them to enjoy what they are doing instead of constantly questioning whether they should be doing something else.

As I was reading about this in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book “Flow” (my favourite recent read), I thought that artists (or authors in any creative field) use the same principle to create a more focused, and therefore more enjoyable, experience for the audience. For example, in photography, we use shallow depth of field to isolate the subject from the background. This way, we do the pre-filtering of the visual input for the viewers, so they have a better visual experience.

Another photography technique that uses the same idea and that I find particularly useful is covering candid environmental portraits to black-and-white. I did it most recently when shooting dance classes at a local studio. In that particular case, while the subjects themselves are photogenic, the background of the dance studio, littered with clothes, shoes and bags of various bright colours, is definitely not. Removing the colour information from the image guides the viewer’s attention to the subject by literally reducing the input bandwidth. I also often use this technique in street photography, where the colours of the background scene are not only impossible to control but also irrelevant to the subject.

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Meta-art

As I am going through my photos from a recent dance performance, I notice a counter-intuitive and somewhat ironic trend: while motion is an essential and arguably most important feature of dance, some of the best photos are those that literally take motion out of the picture by freezing it. I think this is because most interesting photos show the viewers something that they cannot see otherwise. Naturally, they can see the motion and listen to the music while watching the dance performance itself. But an instant frozen in a photo offers something else – an opportunity to see how the dancer’s expressions reflect their effort at that particular moment or the state of flow they are experiencing.

Another thing that I notice is that dance, being an art form, is a pleasure to photograph. It feels like I have less pressure on me as a photographer to create a beautiful image, because even if my photography is unremarkable, the subject itself is already beautiful to begin with. Perhaps, this is why Emily Carr was criticized by her contemporaries for painting totem poles – the idea making art the subject of art was a bit ahead of her time.

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Splash dance

We have an ongoing research project in our lab, where we take closeup photos of droplets of water colliding with each other. The initial motivation was to explore the connection between fluid mechanics and visual arts. This week, we used water splashes a a special effect for a tap dance photo shoot. We didn’t pursue any science per se, but the artistic connection was even stronger, as dance is an art in itself, and photography is an artistic way of expressing it!

When I first started photographing dance performances, I thought that still images would be far inferior to video in the context of dance. After all, video direccaptures music and motion, which are both essential elements of the dance. But as I took more and more dance photos, I realized that the photos have something that the video doe not have – the ability to freeze the motion and to give the audience time to appreciate the fine details of it. If you think carefully, one of the aspects that makes a photograph interesting is offering the viewer a perspective that is not commonly available in real life. With sport photography, for example, the most interesting images show athletes up-close, at the moment of intense physical effort – something that a spectator cannot see from their seats. Likewise, during a dance performance, anyone in the audience can hear the music and see how synchronized the motions of the dancers are. But when the motion is stopped in a photograph, we have a chance to appreciate the details that are are too fleeting to notice otherwise.

This is exactly what makes high-speed photography of water splashes valuable from a scientific standpoint. It is a way to examine the details of the fluid motion that normally happen very fast.

So combining splashes and dance makes a perfect case for creating interesting photos. Typically, we see both dancers and water droplets in motion, so it is fun looking at either (or both, in this case) frozen in time.

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On dedication

As I am going through the photo coverage of the dance classes that take place throughout the year in the studio where my daughter practices, I continue to be amazed by the level of dedication shown by the senior, but still very young, students. I see them at the studio after school literally day in and day out. Hopefully, the photos will help balance the impression one might get by observing only their year-end show that skills and grace, which they demonstrate on stage, are effortless. The result might be graceful, and working towards it is fun, but the effort is certainly paid upfront both by the students and by their teachers.

And I think the fact that the dancers are engaged in training every day plays a large role in sustaining their motivation. I’ve been thinking about the value of daily practice, incremental progress and the attitude of creating a body of work for a while, but it has been very satisfying today to come across a quote of someone widely regarded as a genius that perfectly resonates with this idea:

“Either once only, or every day. If you do something once it’s exciting, and if you do it every day it’s exciting. But if you do it, say, twice or almost every day, it’s not good any more.” – Andy Warhol.

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Body of work

Yesterday after work, I had a five-hour long photo shoot of dance classes in a local studio. I shot around 3500 images, which take approximately 150 GB of hard drive space. I like shooting dance, and I have a personal interest in the subject, because my daughter goes to that dance school. I also like the fact that this a great opportunity to practice my action-shooting skills. Having said this, I am glad that I don’t do this kind of photography every day. In fact, I believe that shorter, but more regular and varied shoots are better for developing skills and creativity.

I recently heard about the value of creating a consistent body of work. I am not sure who said it, but I like the idea that what we do every day is more valuable than what we do every once in a while. For example, my yesterday’s shoot was a big one-time effort, but shooting daily, even a little bit, even just using my phone, is probably more important. Ironically, the next day after a big shoot I am reluctant to pick up the camera at all.

I can really relate to treating all projects not as one-off opportunities, but as stepping stones for creating a consistent body of work. Of course, as many useful concepts, it is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it removes pressure of “successful” performance from each individual project (e.g. a research grant proposal or journal paper submission). On the other hand, if you are always contributing to your body of work, you cannot slack off at any time because you might think a particular project at hand is relatively unimportant. You have to be always “on”, delivering your best work.

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Choosing the subject: how I became interested in dance photography

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Professional photographers often give the following advice on choosing the area of specialization: shoot projects in the field, to which you already have some connection. For example, if you play a particular sport, try shooting that. If you are interested in street photography, try shooting in your home town. If you travel a lot, try travel photography…

This is a sound advice, because choosing the subject based on your current activity makes use of your pre-existing interest and expertise in this area. In my case, this natural selection of the topic happened several times. First, I became interested in travel photography, because my job took me to conferences all over the world. Second, working at the University, I started shooting sporting events involving our student-athletes. Now, I am doing dance and performance photography for a local school, where my daughter takes ballet classes.

Dance photography is a fascinating area. I find that because dance itself is an inherently beautiful form of art, it removes a lot of pressure to create a beautiful image from the photographer – the subject is already beautiful! Perhaps, people like photographing flowers for the same reason.

On the other hand, I was never seriously interested in dancing myself, but through my daughter’s fascination with dance and through learning how to photograph it, I find that my interest in and knowledge of various aspects of it (training methods, performance production, dedication required form the students and the instructors, etc.) also increases. In fact, the idea of enrolling my daughter in a dance class at an early age first came to me when I was assisting another photographer with covering a large year-end performance for the same school. Of course, there were other clues, like her spontaneously starting to dance while watching a DVD of “Tales of Beatrix Potter” ballet in the gift shop of the Palais Garner in Paris, when she was less than two years old.

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