Anybody who is here can skip all that I will write and just look at the pictures.

In 1975 when my wife Rosemary and our two daughters Ale and Hilary arrived in Vancouver from Mexico City we were I believe typical immigrants who took advantage of the services offered by the city (including that of Burnaby where we first lived). This meant that our daughters took swimming lessons and we eventually signed them up at ballet at the Vancouver School of Music. I also drove both daughters daily to Coquitlam to their French Immersion School.

The reason for the ballet is that was the thing to do, even if I had no concept of dance or particular love for ballet. I remember taking them to a performance of the Alvin Ailey Dance Company that featured wonderful white costumes and parasols (it was called Revelations). It soon became an almost forgotten memory.

Classes at the Vancouver School of Music did not go well. Their instructor only put effort in those she deemed had real talent. The rest, including my daughters she ignored.

Both my daughters abandoned dance but the older one pursued her guitar lessons and plays very well. She learned to read music and is quite good at accompanying at the piano at her school in Lillooet.

Memories of my eldest daughter Alexandra dancing ballet as a little girl back in Mexico City have no comparison with the professionalism of what I have seen at the Arts Umbrella Dance Company. In fact this is a serious dance company. Forget that they are a school.

My youngest granddaughter Lauren has been part of the Arts Umbrella Dance Company now for 8 years. She seems committed and I believe she dances well. She has learned poise, grace, aplomb and is what I would call a not normal 15-year-old. As Arty Gordon the director of the Arts Umbrella Dance Company often says, “We get them off the streets.” This she has done with skill, love and a determination that is visible in the allegiance her students give her.

Before I proceed to an explanation of sorts of the pictures herein, that I took on June 16, of Dance to the Music of Time, an Arts Umbrella Dance Recital at the Vancouver Playhouse, let me tell you a bit about the Playhouse Wicked Witches of the West. I talked to one of them as I lined up to enter the theatre. My camera was hidden in the pockets of my leather jacket.

My camera is a Fuji X-E1 which has two features that are essential if one plans to take photographs during a performance at the Playhouse.

1. I gaffer tape the little white light that is a focusing assist for the camera in a dark situation.

2. My camera has two viewfinders. It has the traditional back display. I am able to shut it off and I look through an optical/electronic viewfinder.

This means that if I am careful and sitting in the front row, centre (and I was) that nice woman who smiled at me as we compared notes of dance performances at her venue) the witch will not notice me. She noticed every other parent wanting to snap a picture of their child with their phone!

But because of the witch I was spare in my taking of photographs. I put more effort on my granddaughter’s performance of Les Sylphides choreographed by her instructor Sakiko  Januki which are the bulk of the pictures here. Lauren is smack in the middle of most of them.

A ballerina - an essence  

But I managed to take other pictures. These are of my favourite dance of the evening, Wen Wai Wang’s Fremd (Excerpt) which featured the Arts Umbrella Senior Dance Company.

But there is one charming picture here that was from the beginning of Lynn Sheppard’s The First Movers. I was blown away by her simplicity. I smiled. It helps that I know Sheppard who is Artemis Gordon’s right hand woman. They both practice a Zen-Style method of dance teaching that always points to the heart.

My 15-year-old granddaughter reluctantly brought along the ballet outfit she wore to the Arts Umbrella Dance Company’s finale here in Vancouver a few weeks back for her portrait. Her face showed no passion. She just wanted to get it over with. She came into my studio with her hair down. I told her that ballerinas always dance with the hair up. She countered that she had no ballet pins for her hair. I showed her some bobby pins. She reluctantly did a pretty good job and told me,”It will be fine as long as you don’t take pictures of the back of my head.”

She posed and I snapped. She, like her older sister Rebecca, has gone through this ordeal so many times that she knows how to pose her hands and reacts instantly and accurately to my hand commands - to tilt a bit to the left or to the right or to put her nose a tad up or down. I told her to go serious. I told her to hint at a smile. I told her to look seriously scary as if I were a boy in school she does not like.

At the end I shot two Fuji Instant b+w film shots. I deemed them perfect and told her so. I scanned them and I became even more excited. They are here.

I asked Lauren, “Do you think you dance well?” She answered, “Yes.” I then told her that other people’s opinions were not important as long as she knew inside that she was a good dancer and that she had passion for it.

This was my attempt to explain that every time I take a very good photograph that I think is a very good photograph and others simply nod when I show them, that one must ignore it all. One knows in spite of the silence or criticism from others.

I may have lost her when I attempted to explain to her my love for that ancient Greek philosopher Plato. In my youth I found him confusing. In my old age Plato is constantly in my thoughts. I am always trying to see the essence of a thing. I want to go above the mediocre copy that we as humans (in that Platonic cave) see blurred, indistinct and incomplete. I told Lauren that when I take a photograph I do whatever possible to remove what is not necessary to make what is left the essence (as close as we humans can approach that impossibility).

I told her of the pretty young girl I saw back in 1967 in San Francisco at a Jefferson Airplane concert I had attended while living with my friend Robert in the Haight-Ashbury district of that Ramparts time. She was sitting on the floor at a corner staring at a little glass of what to me must have been Crème de Menthe. I believed that she may have been high on acid and that she was staring at the essence of the colour green.

Bobby Fischer - Photograph - Philippe Halsman

I finished my little story by telling her that my photographs of her were of the essence of what a dancer is. It is the essence of a person that I pursue in my portraiture. I can never achieve the perfection that Philippe Halsman executed in his portrait of Bobby Fischer.

 

Rebecca Stewart - July 5 2017

Yesterday July 5 my Rosemary and I drove to the outskirts of Burnaby where my daughter Hilary, her husband Bruce and one daughter, Lauren live.

My wife the eternal pessimist became depressed when Hilary & Company purchased a house in Burnaby a year ago. We had lived in Burnaby and Rosemary wanted to forget.

My Hilary, the eternal optimist was excited about returning to the Burnaby of her youth. She does not drive so she depends solely on transit and never complains. They are all very happy in their neighbourhood.

What made yesterday special is that temporarily Rebecca, now 19 is staying in what is also her house and sleeping in what is her own room.

We had, all five of us (Bruce was working) lunch together and then Hilary and I went for a swim in the splendid communal swimming pool. Lauren’s ankle was bandaged because of a sprain so she declined to swim with us as Rebecca also did citing that she had washed her hair that morning.

On an impulse I asked Rebecca to pose for me in the balcony (which overlooks the pool) and then I asked Lauren to pose, too.

My mother often spoke that she breast fed me. And she always pointed out that she had been so full of milk in the hospital that they pumped it out to feed other children.