CHOREOGRAPHY AND THE CAMERA

presented at the World Congress on Dance Research, Athens 2009


Good morning/afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My subject today is choreography and the camera. I’m a choreographer who has created some dances specifically for the camera and has recorded others intended for the stage –and those are two very different things. Before I begin, I should tell you that I know visual recordings are often included in live performances, but I will be discussing only the recording itself, and only the recording of dance, from an artistic rather than a technical point of view.

Camerawork opens many doors and closes others. The very fact that the camera records automatically introduces some limitations. A single point of view is expressed at any one time, that of the camera lens, and it’s already history. There is no interaction with performers. An audiovisual presentation in a multimedia work does not present this problem, of course. A performer can come out from among the passive screen viewers. This option is important. After all –and I’m the first to say this– entertainment strokes, art provokes. But that particular provocation cannot be achieved through camerawork.

The same choreography can be recorded more than once, and its strength lies largely in the extent to which a fresh performance can infuse it with new significance. But each time, the resulting work of art will not be primarily a dance. It will be a film or video, one day perhaps a hologram. And although you may see it differently at different times, there’s only one performance which itself remains unchanged.

At the same time of course it is also preserved. This is Advantage Number One which the camera has to offer. I shall list nine more.

Advantage Number Two: Any camera angle is possible. You can hang the camera from the ceiling. You can lay it on the floor. You can drop it. And any camera position is possible. A high angle shot is associated with a godlike perspective, a low angle shot with admiration, a wide angle shot with detachment, a closeup with intimacy. Long shots give a perspective of the dance in the world around us. Closeups focus upon an object or facial expression of great significance which might otherwise be overlooked.

Advantage Number Three: The camera has movement of its own which acts as a running commentary on the action photographed. It may seem to react as a person, attracted or recoiling, choosing whom it follows or wandering aimlessly. This can be smooth as silk, or jumpy as required. It may flow with the movement of the dancers or against it. The camera can travel in and out of the scenery, through a cave, underwater, anywhere you can go and some places you can’t.

Which leads us to Advantage Number Four: You can shoot anywhere. You can shoot in all sorts of places and show the results later on.

Advantage Number Five: Timing can be manipulated. All the movement, or certain parts of it, can be sped up or slowed down. In addition, film can be run backward as well as forward. The peculiar quality of backward movement suggests a timeless perspective outside ordinary experience. Each cleavage of space becomes equally important –you don’t just see the ‘destination’ positions. When dancers converge or separate the event seems an unlikely accident and commands greater attention than it normally would. This is a sensitizing way to look at movement.

Advantage Number Six: Every audience member is seeing the dance from the same point of view. With some choreography, this is the creator’s intention. In one of my dances an insect-like creature was created by several dancers grouped together. The foreshortening effect of the camera flattened the image and made them appear less human. Seen from some angles the creature would have broken up into individuals.

Advantage Number Seven: Any or all of the image can be altered in colour, focus or brightness, or additional images can be added to the mise en scène. Several short cuts are available, such as programs which recognize only certain colours or pixel groups. At a touch, a seemingly new world is created. The opportunities for seemingly magical effects are a revelation to someone used to working within the confines of the stage.

In one of my dances, white figures were suspended in mountain climbing harnesses, filmed in high contrast black and white in front of a dark curtain against which the cables became invisible. In the editing room all black was changed to blue, and slow motion completed the effect of weightlessness. This was many years ago. First we had matte work, then chroma-key, and now we have digitizing.

Advantage Number Eight: Images can be superimposed. Multiple exposures can be used to great effect. For example, stop motion photography creates residual ‘ghosts’ which trail after a dancer's image. They reveal the shape of movement in a way that is impossible for the naked eye looking only at the here and now.

Advantage Number Nine: Images can be juxtaposed. That is, more than one image can be shown at the same time –often distracting, but a choreographer might have reason to do this. One image might complement, satirize or explain hidden meaning in another.

Advantage Number Ten: This is the most important and most often used, and of course it is the edit, that opportunity which can so easily be exploited. It can be a fade, dissolve or form cut, and it can take any shape. Some choreographers’ visions entail staging difficulties which cannot be overcome in any other way. I’m sure none of us will forget Fred Astaire walking along walls and across the ceiling –impossible to perform live. Jump cuts can themselves be part of the movement of a dance film. Their effect can be superhuman, startling or comic. And a single dance can now be shot in several locations. It can begin in Paris and end in Athens. Editing is the single biggest advantage the camera has to offer. But it’s a slippery slope. The beauty of movement in still space is diminished as soon as the edit makes its appearance, and often the effect is too ‘busy’.

Now, after outlining these advantages which camerawork offers the choreographer, I must emphasize that there is a point at which they become inappropriate. One must know when to stop, when not to partake simply because riches are available. I have observed two pitfalls in particular. But before I address myself to the first we need to understand the fundamental principles of camerawork and of dance.

The camera manipulates movement through time and space in a unique manner because it represents three dimensional objects within a two dimensional framework. Dance, on the other hand, has traditionally taken form against a constant spatio-temporal framework in order that its motion should assume paramount importance. Any disturbance in the seamless serenity of its background detracts from the intensity of its impact. Any manipulation of storyline is accomplished through the motion of dancers, costumes, props and sets against that still background, and we concentrate upon this motion.

Just as music takes form against a background of silence, so movement is built upon stillness. The stillness of dance in its traditional presentation is the stillness of the space in which dancers move. The stillness of film and video is the stillness of the screen. Yet the screen is not the framework of a film or video presentation in the same manner that the stage becomes in a live performance. Stage and screen themselves are both constant, but the stage is part of the performance. A film or video presentation is literally a two dimensional image, while dance is a three dimensional process, even though it’s seen in two dimensions. The light falling on a screen, and the screen itself, are both three dimensional, but they are not part of the presentation of a film or video just because they are necessary for it. Film and video re-present three dimensional objects (real or unreal), and what they directly present are only two dimensional images. The stage itself, in contrast, is part of a live performance because that performance is being originally presented, not being re-presented at all.

This brings us to the first pitfall I mentioned earlier, which is as follows: the art of editing in particular is fundamentally opposed to the art of dance. The two are rivals. Fine editing usually takes as its raw material stills or near-stills, and fine dancing is best seen without the irritating interference of the editor. This rule has its exceptions, of course. Some works are enlivened by the use of editing which juxtaposes various camera angles, and the counterpoint which editing provides against the music may be exactly what the choreographer wanted. Sometimes the dynamic camera movement adds to what the dancers are doing or comments upon it. In one dance I created the camera moves in with apparent curiosity upon two fighting figures, then draws back in revulsion. However this sort of thing works best when the work was created with the camera in mind.

Most choreography to date has not been created with the camera in mind, and while it can be viewed from many angles, in most cases each should be fixed and unchanging. To preserve a performance of such traditional choreography, a single camera angle should be held as long as our attention span permits. Our eyes require some change in point of view when looking at a screen, but there should be only enough to satisfy this instinct. Any more will detract from the dance.

Now to the second pitfall, that of depersonalizing movement. The camera affords such possibilities that it’s hard to resist some of them, but occasionally this is advisable. Consider a traditional classical corps de ballet of twenty-four women. Each dancer is trained to conform to an ideal physical type. It would be a sad waste if someone mechanically reproduced the image of one dancer twenty-four times.

All art celebrates individuality, even classical art. In fact, nowhere is individuality more celebrated than in classical art. Inherent in classicism is a balance of culture and nature, and the tension between them to maintain that balance. This exists on the most fundamental level. If you look at truly great dancers you will see both natural and contrived movements working in opposition and together. And when you see a full corps de ballet, the sameness of all intensifies the individuality of each.

Anything in this world is defined as much by what it is not as by what it is. Just as stillness provides the background against which movement takes shape, so discipline focusses our attention on the individual life force which makes each person unique despite all efforts to suppress it. As long as dance remains live movement, all the discipline in the world can only reaffirm the personhood and subjectivity of each performer.

Recently we have seen many departures from live movement, to the point of dispensing with dancers altogether. I find this a disturbing trend. I do not speak against abstraction, which directly invokes responses by means of form, colour and movement patterns. And I do not insist upon live performers. I am interested in puppetry and in animation, particularly in the latter which has always held great promise and especially when it simulates camera movement. I am intrigued by the new technique known as morphing. It is a wonderful thing to make objects dance on screen, to infuse them with personalities, or to imagine new species. I would not wish to discourage new developments in these areas. I merely sound a warning note.

We all have powerful reactions, instinctive and conditioned, to the characteristics of living beings in general and most of all to our own species. A dancer is equipped with physical features inspiring empathy and with responses that invoke memories of our own past experiences. These experiences provide the source which every art must tap, the source from which every art derives its strength. Our departure from nature must not be complete.

These, then, are my reservations regarding the uneasy marriage of camera and choreography. But the relationship is an ongoing one, and we can expect great things to come from it in the future. The advantages of camerawork far outweigh the disadvantages, and we are fortunate to have this medium of expression available to us in addition to the live performances we have enjoyed for so long.


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