Jaw-Dropping "Slow Dancing" Videos by David Michalek
As I mentioned yesterday, I attended the "Slow Dancing" program at the Guggenheim Museum in New York on Sunday night. This program was part of the museum's "Works & Process" series that gives you a behind-the-scenes look at many different art forms.
The Sunday night program was superb.
At this year's Lincoln Center Festival, starting in June, there will be an outdoor installation featuring 50-foot tall, high-definition dance videos projected on to the New York State Theater.
What is special about these dance videos taken by photographer David Michalek - who is married to Wendy Whelan of the NYC Ballet - is how they were made and how they will be projected.
Michalek invited 45 top dancers from around the world, representing many different dance styles, to a studio in NYC created for this project. He shot each dancer for just five seconds using a high-speed, high-definition camera that shot at a rate of 3,000 frames per second. So for each 5-second shoot, he captured 20 gigs of data.
Then he turned the series of captured images into a slow playing movie to jaw-dropping effect. Consider this: He shoots a dancer for just 5 seconds but the resulting video is 10 minutes in length. That means that we get to watch extraordinary dancers move in slow motion so we can experience and analyze movement in ways that were never previously possible.
It sort of is a modern take on the question that Eadweard Muybridge asked in the 1880's when he took pictures in quick succession of trotter horses to see if all four legs simultaneously left the ground - they do. But in this modern take, we get to ponder what really happens to a dancer's muscles and body position as they perform a series of movements.
Sunday Night's Program
At the Works & Process program Sunday night, we were treated to performances that viewers outside the New York State Theater will not get to see. We were shown three larger than life slow-motion videos that were created by Michalek.
But before each video, the dancer came on stage - a small one at the Guggenheim theater - and performed their 5-second routine. Then we watched the high-definition video of the dancer immediately afterwards.
The three dancers we got to see were Wendy Whelan, Herman Cornejo from ABT and Desmond Richardson. As Tonya Plank wrote in her excellent post about this event:
Michalek joked that this was the only time we’d ever see dancers of this stature dance on a stage for a mere five seconds!
In addition to watching the super-short performances and the slow-motion video, there was a panel discussion led by arts presenter and producer Nigel Redden featuring Michalek, Richardson and Whelan. Michalek did an excellent job of explaining how he researched and created this project. And Richardson and Whelan provided engaging insight from the dancers' perspective. As Whelan shared, a dancer is really exposing the most minute elements of her movement for the world to view and assess.
The Work of Photographer Lois Greenfield
In February, I wrote about "Held," a dance performance featuring Australian Dance Theatre's (ADT) and dance photographer Lois Greenfield. In a nutshell, Greenfield was on stage during the performance taking pictures of the high-flying moves of ADT dancers. These images were then projected in real-time on to two projection screens. This way the audience could see larger-than-life shots of the dancers that had been taken just moments before.
I did not see this ADT performance, but my impression is that the "Slow Dancing" photos/videos (I don't know what to call them) of Michalek are more interesting to me. In "Held," Greenfield is making choices for the audience. The projected images we see are the ones she decided to shoot.
But with "Slow Dancing," Michalek is not making choices for us in the same way. The entire 5-second movement phrase is available for use to watch, analyze and examine.
On top of that, taking traditional pictures of dancers is an art form, but it is not dance in the sense of movement through space and time. A picture is just capturing a moment in time disconnected from all other moments.
But the "Slow Dancing" project is directly about dance because we get to see movement unfold in front of our eyes in time and space. And we see what was previously unseen in stunning minute detail, which to me makes it a jaw-dropping experience.
Posted by Doug Fox on April 24, 2007 9:12 AM
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Hi -- thanks for linking to me :) I just wanted to add briefly that, while of course I love Michalek's vision and can't wait to see how it looks in the plaza this summer and -- more importantly for me -- how others react to it, I do think that dance photography (like dance writing :) ), is an art in itself and I enjoy seeing the photographer's artistic vision as well as the dancer's. For example, Roy Round and Fabrizio Ferri really made me think differently about the ballet and I feel that if the marketing people at the big ballet companies were smart about their advertising, they'd really use those photographs to much greater effect (right now, the Ferri photos are, for the most part, confined to a small book that sits in the opera gift shop for very few people to see...), but that is another discussion. Sylvie Guillem's photography is mind-blowing as well... Anyway, so while I love Michalek's allowing us to view the dancer's every movement for ourselves, I do appreciate the photographer's artistic vision and interpretation and don't see his or her work as taking the choice of what to see away from me.
Also, why assume dance is movement, you modernist!! Ha ha, just kidding. I know I moaned about that Andre Lepecki book Tony Schultz at the Winger is having us read for their first book discussion since it's so theory-oriented and difficult to understand, but it actually is quite good once you get into it and get used to his vocabulary. You should join!