I have spent a couple of days selecting (cropping and fixing) 100 photographs from 600. My pupils are rectangular. I have decided to post these 100 and add the rest in the next few days. Those who will look at these 100 might want to return here in a few days to see more.

 

Vancouver Playhouse - June 11 2015

All that  and in this 21^st century with magazines being moribund I basked in memories of that past in which I was paid to go to Europe, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, Florida, across Canada and the former Yugoslavia. I was settled in  “this is what I used to do” thing until it all changed on January 19, 2014 at the Q7 dance studio of the Arts Umbrella Dance Company. Armed with a camera that my Rosemary had urged me to buy, a Fuji X-E1 I discovered my own personal way of recording dance.

On June 11, 2015 I photographed the day’s rehearsals at the Vancouver Playhouse and the first of the Arts Umbrella Dance Company final performances for this dance school year. It was called Dahl’s House and the dance pieces involving the very young and the graduates had to do with the whimsical elements of Roald Dahl’s novels.

For me it was a bittersweet experience as I noted the black graduate T-shirts of the dancers soon-to-depart to dance companies around the world. It was bittersweet for me (I wrote about it here) because I felt that in some way beginning in January 2014 I, too, had signed up for dance school. My beginning was exciting and I soon thought I had perfected my style. I soon found out the limitations of my camera. Or it simply might be my inability to adapt to it. These final pictures leave me cold. There are a few good ones but I know what they could have been and are not.

There is hope, of course. Unlike the graduate students who now have to seriously be professional in their chosen fields I can still imagine that what I am doing (and I hope I will be able to do in next year’s crop of Arts Umbrella dancers) will still be fun, challenging and enthralling.