Slow Dancing

There's only one more night left of David Michalek's Slow Dancing in Los Angeles, so if you haven't seen it, GO! Photographer David Michalek took slow motion photographs of dancers doing a 5 second phrase, stretched it out to over 10 minutes in real time so we watch the dancers moving in very slow motion with incredible detail (he used a special camera that the military uses to analyze motion detail).

Other bloggers have written more extensively and eloquently about this exhibit, so I won't write too much (one must choose between blogging and sleep - sleep wins tonight).

But I will say one thing - while looking at the exhibit, I was thinking about an art critic's comment from the exhibit's New York run that only dance critics had reviewed Slow Dancing, and thus the event's merit as visual art had not been properly assessed. Looking at the exhibit, I saw a lot of similarities to Bill Viola's slow motion work, which was at the Getty in Los Angeles several years ago - so maybe to purely visual art fans this wouldn't have been a particularly ground breaking exhibit. But the fun for dance fans is that a video/photo artist has taken as his subject some pretty well known subjects in the field of dance. Dance viewers get an extra significance beyond simply watching people move in slow motion - its also an incredible chance to analyze the movement of favorite, even legendary dancers like Judith Jamison and Allegra Kent, plus today's top dancers like Herman Cornejo, Wendy Whelan and Janie Taylor. We get an extra level of fascination in watching their movement slowed to a crawl, having seen them perform live in real time so often - so perhaps it is right that so many dance critics reviewed this.

Of course I had fun watching some favorite ballet dancers in slow motion. But I found myself even more fascinted watching the many other types of dancers that Michalek recorded: my favorite was Shantala Shivalingappa doing an Indian (as in, from India) dance. Where ballet and other athletic dancers dancers had weird "in between" faces while executing high jumps - you know, half closed eye lids, expressions that looked painful - Shivalingappa always looked calm, focused, and totally alive in her slow motion. Each detail of her body was always fully formed and placed, totally interesting to see.

An overview of the viewing screens at the Music Center, with Allegra Kent in the foreground. The four screens were arranged around the Music Center's main fountain, in between the complex's three main theaters, and you could watch the same image - nonreversed! - on both sides of each screen. Los Angeles City Hall is in the distant background, with a full moon overhead.

New York City Ballet dancer Wendy Whelan, who is also David Michalek's wife.

Herman Cornejo of American Ballet Theatre, mid jump. The Mark Taper Forum is in the background.

Gabriel “Kwikstep” Dionisio spinning very slowly on his head, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in the background.

Elizabeth Streb - I just took a picture of her because she looked kind of cool in that suit amongst the many images of other dancers in flowy dresses.

The project's official web site is here.