Quick Photoshoot

5th February 2017

After an 8 hour ballet rehearsal with 3 hours of pointé work I decided to quickly capture my feet in their current state after when I had arrived home. These images are very 'mild' images of how my feet have looked compared to much harder and longer rehearsals, such as longer hours on pointé etc. I feel capturing my own dance process throughout this project will help show the audience how dancers suffer many bruises, blisters and cuts throughout the dance process along with the beautiful side of things; showing the pain from under the beauty.

Powerful Image: Tiejun Wang

I came across this photograph below when doing some research on the internet. This image was taken by press photographer Tiejun Wang. It is titled 'Sweat Makes Champions' which won second prize in the Daily Life, Singles, category at the World Press Photo contest. The image is showing four young girls doing toe-pressure training at their gymnastics school in China. This training went on for 30 minutes to strengthen their muscles in their toes, legs and ankles. Having strong muscles and ankles in dance and gymnastics is a must for dancers due to the amount of pressure that is applied in all styles of dance. From a non-dancer's perspective this would seem very tough and 'wrong' to make these girls do such a thing for so long however, from a dancer's perspective this is a great exercise to for the girls to do as their strength will become stronger and process from a much younger age therefore, helping the girls become much more powerful dancers/gymnasts when they are older. It is very important to look after the feet and care for them throughout training, so exercises such as this are really important. This image has inspired me to look more into how a dancers perspective is much different to someone who looks into the dance world and produce more artwork showing how we change are bodies and why we put ourselves through the pain.

Eadweard Muybridge

Muybridge was an English Photographer, 1830-1904. He looked at pioneering work and creating studies of motion through photography and also did some work on motion-picture projection. Muybridge's pioneering work consisted on animal locomotion in 1877 -78. He used multiple cameras to capture motion in stop-motion photographs. Muybridge also had a device called a 'Zoopraxiscope' which he invented in 1879. This projected motion pictures onto a film strip which was rotated on glass disks rapidly to give the impression of motion. The stop-motion images he had captured were painted onto the glass or produced with holes onto the film strip. This is now used in cinematography.  It is said that this was in fact the first ever projector produced. In the 1880's Muybridge then went onto the University Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Here he produced over 100,000 images of animals and humans in motion. Muybridge managed to capture what the human eye cannot distinguish as separate movements. 

I really like the idea of using Muybridge's idea of capturing motion within my project as dance is all about movement and the structure of how dancers get their bodies to move in such ways. Although I do not own a Zoopraxiscope and only one camera I have thought of a different way to produce my own inspired photography. I could set up my camera in my dance studio and record dancers movement as a film. I could then take this footage and pause the clip each second to produce images. On the other hand, I could set my camera onto the continuous shutter, meaning I could capture many images all at once as the dancer moves. All of my footage could then be turned into short films, gifs or presented in the style of Muybridge as a film strip. This is one idea that could help me progress my project.

(Zoopraxiscope)

Hannah Hansen

Here are some videos of Hannah Hansen's work. These are my favourite videos she has of her work as each one has a different style of movement/choreography, showing different ways to explore with the body.

Inspired Dance Videos

Here I have linked some videos showing different styles of dance and how each dancer moves differently due to their training. Each dancer you ever meet will all have something unique about them whether it it flexibility, technique or choreography itself. I wanted to link a few different styles of dance as a starter point as too which style would fit my project well.

These videos below show a mixture of group work (canons, being in sync with one another etc), partner work, using objects within dance and also solos.