Heraclitus & My Ghosts Of Dance
Sunday, May 04, 2014
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| Fei Guo, September 2003 |
A while back I joined a facebook discussion
group called Dialogue on Dance Writing. I felt I wanted to comment on some of
the postings but I could not do so unless I joined. I did and a few weeks after I was
allowed in. Nothing much ever happens in Dialogue on Dance Writing and the only
active contributor seems to be Battery Opera’s Su-Feh Lee. Today I saw a posting that
interested and I contributed. But I had a nagging feeling that Su-Feh Lee and I
had met previously.
And indeed I had sometime in February 2003
I photographed Lee and her partner David McIntosh (Battery Opera) for the Georgia
Straight. I have no idea what led me to make an 8x10 print of the session and
take it to Point Grey Road
and immerse it at the beach. I remember I dropped one of the film backs of my
Mamiya RB into the sea water and that the repair exceeded what the Straight
paid me for the photograph.
While rummaging through my files to find Su-Feh
Lee I also found the portraits of a Ballet BC dancer I have little recollection
of. There are negatives, a contact sheet and one Polaroid in the file labeled
Guo, Fei.
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| Battery Opera - David McIntosh, Su-Feh Lee, Feb 2003 |
The Polaroid is luminous and the expression
on Guo is just right.
Since I stopped being asked to photograph
dancers and other members of the arts organizations of Vancouver I have noticed
that not only has dance writing and dance previews have declined in quantity
but also (who am I to opine as I am a photographer) on quality, too.
I look with interest and jealousy the
photographs of the different dance companies in New York City in my NY Times. In these ads
the dancers are given personality and their sex is made evident. The pictures
show dancers as actors, as people and as humans.
Local images of dancers seem to reflect
them as soaring birds, frozen in time and space. There is nothing of their
humanity in these images.
As an obsolete/redundant ex-magazine
photographer I believe that there is ample room to show dancers in another
light.
I sometimes feel that all those dance performances I have been to, become instant ghosts in my mind. Like Heraclitus wrote, I dip my hand into waters that are not ever repeated. But like sounds that linger I feel that the performances and the dancers remain somewhere and can be brought back. My files of dancers I should perhaps re-file as Ghosts of Dance.
