Capturing Dance

How do you capture the feeling of motion in a photograph? And how do you film dance in a way that conveys the immediacy and magic of live performance?

They’re two related questions—and, basically, unanswerable ones. But here at DS, we’ve recently come across two artists’ beautiful attempts to address them.

First up: Choros, an experimental video by Michael Langan. He layered multiple clips of a woman doing simple dance steps, stretching each clip to a different length to create a series of visual echoes. It’s a little trippy, but it also evokes that feeling you get while watching live dance of having certain images burned into your retinas.

[vimeo_embed http://player.vimeo.com/video/35770492?title=0&byline=0&color=e99900 expand=1]

And then there are a series of photographs taken by Leon Neal of Britain’s National Post. The long-exposure images of dancers participating in the “Emerging Dancer 2013” competition record multiple movements in one image. Transitional steps become painterly motion blurs. (Like Langan’s film, these are also kind of trippy. I guess the lesson of the day is that dance is far out, man.)

[portfolio_slideshow nowrap=0 thumbs=true timeout=4000 showtitles=true showcaps=true showdesc=true]