Filming Dance (for the Web)

This morning a first attempt to film a dance session– an advanced-beginners ballet class at the Broadway Dance Center in midtown– revealed a few complications in filming dance which are especially unfortunate for a newcomer to video.

The most obvious problem: dancers move around, a lot.  At higher levels their movements are fast and their footwork is intricate, but even simple steps can be difficult to capture steadily.  And getting close is a non-option.  Ballet extension keeps the camera at least a leg’s length away.  

Familiarity with the dance routine being performed/filmed might remedy these problems.  It’s surely easier to execute an effective shot if you know what’s going to happen next on stage, and since repetition and rehearsal are two key elements of BT’s ballet training, familiarity with student routines should be the natural byproduct of access and attendance.  But the participating dancer(s) would have to be awfully accomodating, and patient, and stoic. 

The class I visited this morning at Broadway Dance Center was crowded.  Portable barres were staggered from wall to wall in the small studio, which made moving around without disrupting the dancers almost impossibile.  Still, I was able to land a few shots that I think are at least aesthetically pleasing.  The basic ballet extensions of arm and leg create dynamic lines within the frame, and close-ups of the footwork (which, I learned, are not impossible to get if students are at the barre and the cameraperson is lying down on the floor) are terribly cool. 

Close-ups like this will have to substitute for the whole-stage view of dance that a live audience enjoys; such a wide shot would be useless in web-video.  That means that the visual element of dance-as-narrative can’t be portrayed in video for this particular project.  But using video to break down the ensemble into individual dancers– not even individual dancers, really, but rather an individual dancer’s individual movements of foot and leg and arm– could be effective, I think; it could parallel what I hope to do in text, which is to look at the school not as an overwhelming entity but as a collection of parts.  Those parts are the characters involved and, further, the parts of their characters– i.e., dance students and professional dancers, and their individual goals and sacrifices.