In Front of a Lens
You step onto the stage and take a deep breath in. You have put weeks of work into refining every aspect of this dance. You have calculated every turn and shift of the weight so that this performance can be perfect—this one performance. Stepping on stage is the pinnacle moment when you have one chance to show all that you have been training for. Every dancer has felt this reality. However, as a performer in a dance film, this pinnacle moment feels quite a bit different.
There is no “one shot” when performing in a dance film. In fact, there often are hundreds of shots. This may pose new physical and mental challenges for dancers who are used to live performance. This past weekend, when I performed in the dance film I directed and choreographed entitled 14 Faces, I felt as if I fully realized the depth of the difference between live performance and dancing in front of a lens.
To start, you aren’t the only one on the stage when you are performing in a dance film. As our cinematographer, Lauren Duncan, navigated through our movements with her camera, she became a part of our dance. Her movements were choreographed so that the most interesting viewpoints could be caught on camera. As dancers this means we had to negotiate room for her to fit in the space and maintain a higher level of spatial awareness than a live performance may require.
While this may sound like an added burden, in fact it is one of the most interesting and rewarding aspects of creating a dance film for the dancer. When an audience member views a live performance, they only get to see the movement once and only from the viewpoint from which they stand in that moment. Sometimes this means that they don’t appreciate how difficult, intimate and subtle a movement can be. The camera gave Lauren the opportunity to see every perspective of the movement, which will then allow the audience of the film to see different ways of looking at the same movement. This ability to show the audience how complex our movements can be depending on how one views it is one of the reasons I find film so interesting.
As I mentioned before, dance films pose new challenges for performers both physically and mentally. I was aware of the physical stamina it may take t
o perform the movement in 14 Faces for the various shots we needed, but I was not as prepared for the mental challenge of performing in front of a lens. In the blink of an eye we go from prepping for the shot to rolling. This fast paced environment means that you must be able to go in and out of the mindset of the piece in a blink of an eye. 14 Faces requires a very serious and focused intention behind the movement. Sometimes if I felt frazzled before a take began, it was hard for me to enter that world immediately. Being able to emote through the lens of a camera is difficult enough, and to push oneself to active that degree of performance in the blink of an eye proved to be quite a challenge.
Overall, there is something unique that a dancer experiences when in front of a camera. It poses new challenges and pushes us in different ways both as technicians and as performers. The most important idea, that as a performer I get incredibly excited about when it comes to film, is that the audience gets to be part of the dance. They get to experience the movement from a perspective that they never have before. This new perspective will not only allow audience members to see our art form in a new way, but also give us as artists the opportunity to approach dance in a new way.
