My about-to-be-17 granddaughter Lauren has been dancing at
the Arts Umbrella Dance Company since she was 7. Alas! She is giving dance up
and is going to concentrate on working over the summer and concentrating on her
clarinet playing. My Rosemary and I are understandably shocked. But as
grandparents, little by little we are learning to withdraw and understand that
a teenager should decide on the forthcoming future and what to do with it.
These pictures I took a couple of weeks ago at the Arts
Umbrella studio on West 7th Avenue.
I have been taking photographs at rehearsals, back stage and
of performances of the Arts Umbrella Dance Company for quite a few years.
Working for magazines and particularly for the Georgia Straight gave the needed
credentials to take photographs and to experiment with slow shutter blurs or
getting the personality of individual dancers on film or digitally. With Lauren
no longer at that institution it would seem that any purpose I may still hold
for going to photograph performances is gone.
I look at that and these photographs with melancholy but I am understanding (or so
I say to myself) that at age 77 I have to let go.
There will be two more performances of the Arts Umbrella
Dance Company in two weeks that will have my Lauren in the ranks. I will take
pictures. And then no more.
In passing I must congratulate Lauren for having persisted for so long. Dance will somehow be in her blood and she will have inherited a poise and grace that will serve her well in whatever it is she does with her life henceforth.
