Category: Performance

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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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Getting started

A productivity hack that I’ve been rediscovering: it makes sense to start an activity early, that is before you are ready. Even more specifically, start before you want to. Once you get going, it would be relatively easy to continue. The reminder for this came in the form of a memo from my daughter’s strings teacher. She wrote to the parents of her students that kids are typically reluctant to pick up an instrument for their daily practice sessions, but are happy to continue playing once they start.

This technique has to do with the theory that we, humans, have a certain amount of inertia that makes us reluctant to stop wha we are doing at the moment and switch to another task. Incidentally, it also means that we should try stopping an activity before we are ready to do so. If the next step of the project is absolutely clear, it would make it so much easier to pick it up again the next day, or whenever it is time for the next session.

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Practice strategies for adults

One particularly neat thing about being a parent to a nine-year-old is that it gives me an excuse opportunity to try various activities alongside her without an expectation of accomplishment. Theoretically, it’s a license to be a beginner without any pressure to improve performance. Still, having this mindset is easier in theory than in practice. Realistically, one still needs to make some progress to maintain motivation. This raises the question: should adult beginners practice differently from children? I don’t know the answer, but I suspect that it is a ‘yes, but only after they’ve acquired the basic skills’.

Take kendo as an example (which my daughter never practiced, by the way, although I had observed other kids’ training). Physical training aimed at improving speed and endurance is a huge aspect of children’s keiko (practice sessions). It is unavoidable for adults  too, but beyond a certain level of  physical ability, the adults are typically directed to shift their focus to other elements of practice, e.g., technique, strategy, psychology, philosophy. It seems that even though there is no hope for an adult beginner to reach a level of mastery that is hypothetically available to children (provided that the kids don’t quit their practice), a better use of an adult’s time would be to concentrate on other, arguably more advance elements of the art, that are beyond pure physical skills.

If we consider violin-playing (which I started studying together with my daughter), an analogue to suburi (empty strike) practice in kendo would be playing scales. The physical skill, i.e. a combination of manual dexterity and sensory perception, which is required for extracting other-than-horrendous sounds from a violin is considerable, and it makes the learning curve very steep. As expected, my daughter leaves me in the dust in terms of the progress. As much as I would like to play the ‘adult beginner’ card and shift my focus to some of the more exciting practice elements, like dynamics of the phrases, etc., the required threshold of the physical skill remains elusive.

Ready for battle. Stll life with chess pieces.

Chess is another example, where adults often strive to improve, but find it difficult. It is a bit different from both kendo and music in that all these activities are difficult to master, but chess is relatively easy to learn. This accessibility is deceptive. It makes people believe that there is no limit to how much they’d be able to improve. While this “everything is possible if you try” attitude is generally admirable, chess is perhaps the most striking example where innate ability (i.e. talent) is dominant over hard work, perseverance and training methodology. Still, there is an analogy to the practice of musical scales and suburi sword swings in chess. The limiting skill there appears to be visualization – the ability to literally see the position of pieces in your mind, without physically setting them up on the board. This ability not only enable the accomplished players do party tricks like playing simultaneous blindfold games, but more fundamentally, to calculate the possible variations several moves ahead.

So it appears that working on the basics, in other words, practicing like a children, is a good strategy for adult beginners too, even if they they are not aiming to achieve great heights in a particular activity. And if they are aiming high, then it is even more critical, because without mastery of the fundamental skills, their progress will always be limited.

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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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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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Why hacks don’t cut it

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“You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That’s the way all the experts do it.”
— Robert Pirsig, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance“

The concept of “hacking” or finding an unconventional, often more efficient, way of achieving something has become very popular. Indeed, some people even build their careers around it. For example, Tim Ferriss has become famous for his books “The 4-Hour Workweek“, “The 4 Hour Body” and “The 4-Hour Chef“. As the titles imply, the underlying idea in all of them is to maximize the outcome of minimal efforts. I am a fan of Tim’s approach partly because I like the ideas of innovation and optimization that are inherent in hacking, but also because his view of hacking is deeper than simple cutting of corners on the way to a goal.

The concept of 10,000 hours that are needed to master a craft, which was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in “Outliers“, has recently been debunked, or at least put into a wider context by several authors. Also, the Pareto’s 80/20 rule of diminishing returns when practicing a skill suggests that a lifetime dedicated to any single task would be an example of inefficiency. However, in my personal experience, whenever I see an example of something remarkable being created, it is inevitably a result of a lot of work. When everything is said and done, even if we follow all the quick recipes for success (“10 steps to taking a perfect photo” or “10 steps to writing a perfect blog post”, etc.), the very act of cutting corners removes something valuable both from the process and from the resulting product. We really do need to live the craft that we practice, make it our way, like the “do” in kendo, kado, shodo, etc.

In photography, for example, there is no way to fake the genuine knowledge of the subject, the intuition that comes from true mastery of the technique, the emotional connection with the models, etc. In the event and reportage photography in particular, one needs to become a participant, rather than the observer, in order to convey the emotional content to the viewers. Recently, I was photographing local dance students participating in a Santa Claus parade, an event that is difficult to capture because of the poor lighting conditions (it takes place at night) and general setting (the spectators are separated from the participants, who quickly pass by them on the street). I wanted to take pictures that would capture the excitement of the the early holiday season and the enthusiasm of the young dancers. My strategy was to join them as they were preparing for the parade – meeting at the lobby of the local museum, lining up in their spot long before the start of the parade, doing the sound checks, going over their dance routines again and again to keep warm on a cold November evening. The performance itself probably counted for 80% of the impact on the spectators and took 20% of the effort from the dancers, considering all the hours they spent preparing for the show. But I think that it is capturing the other 80% of the event from the participants’ perspective is what makes the memories recorded in the photos valuable and gives them emotional content.

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Processing time

  Sitting in airports during flight connections or in the planes during the flights themselves had an unexpected positive side effect: it gave me time to think about and process quite a bit of information that piled up earlier in the trip. This information was diverse both in form and in subject. It ranges from talks that I listened to at the conferences, meetings with colleagues, pictures I took, museums I visited, food I ate, conversations with parents that I had.

This processing mode was kind of forced on me, similar to the trip itself – a forced track back from Madrid to Voronezh to pick up a passport. I planned to make use of the airport time by reading and writing papers, and I did some of that, but travel is inherently tiring, so I often found myself staring out of the window, thinking about my travel experiences.

It is not surprising that thinking without trying to be productive is quite useful, but this work mode typically does not occur naturally. There are certain conditions that are conducive for it. In the case of this particular trip, they were:

  1. I was alone. Typically, I try to completely focus on my three-year-old daughter when I am with her, but this time, my family stayed in Madrid.
  2. There were no pressing but unimportant things to be done (like minor everyday stuff at home or at work).
  3. There really was a lot of information to process – the previous few weeks were full of new impressions and interactions.
  4. I had substantial chunks of time available, so I could do both “real work” and just think.

Unfortunately, replicating these conditions in everyday life is not easy – one almost has to be shaken out of the routine and forced into the “deep work” mode.  

  

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    Motion in dance photography

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    Motion and emotion are two elements that can make a photo stand out. Dancing, by definition, involves both of these elements, so it makes an attractive subject for photography.

    What makes motion attractive is that it represents something impermanent. Even though the instant is frozen in a static image, the lack of static balance in the dancer’s body implies that this moment is fleeting and therefore precious. Thus, the viewer subconsciously realizes that this photo is an opportunity to observe something that ceased to exist and cannot be recovered. This imbalance, the hint of the impairment nature of the subject is what resonates with the viewer’s emotions. As Allan Watts puts it in his “Wisdom of Insecurity“, “In sculpture, architecture, and painting the finished form stands still, but even so the eye finds pleasure in the form only when it contains a certain lack of symmetry, when, frozen in stone as it may be, it looks as if it were in the midst of motion.”

    Incidentally, I generally find “frozen” motion images more appealing and interesting than those with (intentionally) blurred motion. As an engineer, I can speculate that this might be because motion blur implies averaging over time, which is a steady-state component of the motion. The emotional connection with the impermanence of the movement is thus lost in the blurred image.

    Recently, I have been working on post-processing of photos that I took during a performance of a local dance school. There was no particular agenda for the photo shoot, i.e. I did not have to capture portraits of all dancers or even cover the entire performance. In that sense, it was the best possible scenario, where I was free to choose what and how to shoot and how many images to deliver.

    I found that some types of dances were more photogenic than others. For example, I had far more interesting images of hip-hop than of tap. I think this has to do with the amount of large, exaggerated motion that happens during a articular dance. While hip-hop dancers are almost acrobatic in their movements, the tap performers rarely appear to be out-of-balance at any given instant.

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