Filming Dance

[pherank]

It is certainly possible to find articles on cinematography and videography for theater productions. But to find anything relevant to dance, that is depressingly difficult. Depressing because it gives an indication of how little thought is being paid to the subject. However, back in the 1980s, Daniel Nagrin wrote an article on the subject - hoping for a kind of renaissance of dance on TV/video to take place (similar to the success of MTV music videos). The dance on TV resurgence didn't really materialize, but I find Nagrin's opening statements to be very astute, so I will post them here:

"The camera is enmeshed in a mess of contradictions. The camera eye is round but the picture it produces is a rectangle; a shape which has no relation to what the human eye sees. If its focus is sharpened it receives less light. If the film is faster, the resultant picture is grainier. The faster the exposure time, the less light enters.

Music and dance compliment each other, one being essentially audible and the other visible. Camera and dance are competitive. Both are visible arts with profoundly different structures. Videotape, like film, flattens the dynamic of dance, the frame cripples the spatial adventures of dance and the sweating, exultant, imminence of the living dancer is lost. Further, videotape has considerably less impact than film since its picture is smaller and poorer in quality. Whatever weaknesses there are in video picture are amplified by big screen television: blurred and vitiated color. Compared with the development of audio technology, video is primitive, something like the ten inch ’78 recordings. There is no question that dance seen on a television monitor is a giant step down from the real thing. And yet, for all of its obvious limitations, the technology has been embraced by the dance community and with good reason. Unlike film, it’s affordable and that has made all the difference. It can perform four distinct and different functions.

1. Archival. It is the quickest way to record everything from the Spring Concert the neighborhood school of dance to the premier of a major dance company.
2. Coaching and teaching repertoire.
3. A marketing tool, directed towards committees giving grants and potential sponsors.
4. Creating a new art form by translating the poem of the living dance into a new poem to be seen in the shadows dancing on the flat screen. This fourth function contains a seed that might alter the future shape of dance. Between millions of TV sets and the millions of video cassettes, there exists a potential new stage and a new medium for dance–if the two artists, the choreographer and the videographer can come together in this work. Rock musicians formed a symbiosis with videographers that set them on a new course and a new stage – Music TV. Is Dance TV next?"

The Art Of Videotaping Dance
Translating the Poetry of Living Dance to a Poem on Videotape
By Daniel Nagrin

https://nagrin.org/the-art-of-videotaping-dance/

[Quiggin]

Merrill Brockway's ideas for filming Stravinsky Violin Concerto and The Four Temperaments at Opryland for WNET in 1977 might be a good point of reference. They also flesh out some of Daniel Nagrin's thoughts on "the eye of a camera" while contradicting others.

(Re Nagrin: I once saw him do a wonderful and very intimate performance at Cal State Long Beach consisting of a log dance, hopping on and off and dancing about, while giving a lecture on what he was doing, and later a ballroom dance with an invisible partner, again narrating a patchwork of thoughts.)

Brockway in his program notes for "Choreography by Balanchine" said he was apprehensive about the "densely populated" finale of Violin Concerto and being able to fit everyone onto the television screen, which was 21" or 23" inches in those days and often cropped away some of the edges of the image. 

Quote

Balanchine recognized that the problem was geometric: while performance space is a rectangle, the space defined by a camera is a triangle. How were we to fit all these figures into a triangle without disproportionately diminishing the size of the dancer, not to mention the impact of Balanchine's choreography? He told me, "I fix," and swiftly directed the restaging. Many of these special changes that drew the corps closer together for the cameras were later incorporated into the stage version.

So the clue that filmic space is triangular might be a helpful clue for a filmmaker. But also that you don't have to capture everything. John Clifford has a clip on his YouTube channel of Violette Verdy in Emeralds. It was taken from a high angle and is only a detail, as you say of a painting, but it captures Verdy's movements and the counterpoint of the dancers behind her, especially the crisp placement of their hands.  The angle is the one that Degas would sometimes use for his ballet pastels. It also establishes a relationship between the dancer and the viewer rather than being anonymous and neutral.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOUnusN1dF0

 

Edited April 9, 2021 by Quiggin

[pherank]

21 minutes ago, Quiggin said:

Merrill Brockway's ideas for filming Stravinsky Violin Concerto and The Four Temperaments at Opryland for WNET in 1977 might be a good point of reference. They also flesh out some of Daniel Nagrin's thoughts on "the eye of a camera" while contradicting others.

(Re Nagrin: I once saw him do a wonderful and very intimate performance at Cal State Long Beach consisting of a log dance, hopping on and off and dancing about, while giving a lecture on what he was doing, and later a ballroom dance with an invisible partner, again narrating a patchwork of thoughts.)

Brockway in his program notes for "Choreography by Balanchine" said he was apprehensive about the "densely populated" finale of Violin Concerto and being able to fit everyone onto the television screen, which was 21" or 23" inches in those days and often cropped away some of the edges of the image. 

So the clue that filmic space is triangular might be a helpful clue for a filmmaker. But also that you don't have to capture everything. John Clifford has a clip on his YouTube channel of Violette Verdy in Emeralds. It was taken from a high angle and is only a detail, as you say of a painting, but it captures Verdy's movements and the counterpoint of the dancers behind her, especially the crisp placement of their hands.  The angle is the one that Degas would sometimes use for his ballet pastels. It also establishes a relationship between the dancer and the viewer rather than being anonymous and neutral.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOUnusN1dF0

 

Thanks for the comments, Quiggin. I wondered if anyone had seen Nagrin's dancing.