Collaboration sets off motion senses

August 10, 2004

Holding pattern ... "The work gets such an immediate response because I think everyone can respond to the thrill of flight," says the ADC's artistic director, Garry Stewart.

Held offers images with a twist, writes Sharon Verghis.

Prompted by Lois Greenfield's camera lens, a dancer makes his body look as if it has just been poured out of a tube. Another mimics the lazy, wayward drift of a handful of cocoa powder thrown into the air. Limbs are contorted to resemble the internal workings of watches, a piece of driftwood and any number of happy accidents of gravity and choreography.

In her first book of photography, Breaking Bounds, under an image of American dancers Daniel Ezralow and Ashley Roland caught in an improbable corkscrew shape, the dance photographer extraordinaire sets out her philosophy. "To quote Andre Breton, I'm interested in depicting the union of two apparently incompatible realities," she writes.

Perhaps that's what makes the eye struggle to make sense of what it is seeing in a Greenfield image. Dancers levitate, curl up like inchworms, and nestle like sleeping birds in jute sculptures.

Over the past 30 years, Greenfield has used her unerring eye to capture some of the world's best dancers in full flight, from Bill T. Jones and Paul Taylor to David Parsons and Merce Cunningham. She has shot for high-profile ad campaigns (most prominent is the gorgeous images of dancers from the Antigravity Dance Company for Raymond Weil watches), for solo exhibitions, for calendars, her glossy books, and promotional campaigns for dance companies around the world.

Advertisement Advertisement

Last year, she took a growing interest in a new way of photographing dance - injecting her images into the choreography of a work to create "live photo events" - a major step forward after meeting Garry Stewart, the artistic director of the Australian Dance Theatre, for the first time in New York.

There was an instant "terrific chemistry", the result of their collaboration, Held, making its debut at the Adelaide Festival this year. Last night it became the dance calendar's surprise critical hit, taking out three major dance awards in the 2004 Helpmann Awards - for best choreography in a ballet or dance work, best male dancer in a ballet or dance work (Ross McCormack) and best female dancer in a dance work (Larissa McGowan).

The work, which opens at the Opera House tomorrow as part of an international dance season, Far Flung, was also nominated for best ballet or dance work, but lost out to Bangarra's Bush.

At the heart of Held lies an engaging, if not exactly groundbreaking, concept - one Greenfield candidly views as a crowd-pleaser. She spends about two-thirds of the hour-long work on stage, nimbly dodging dancers as they whirl and leap while waiting for a moment to dart in and photograph a spectacular move. The resulting image is then projected onto two four-metre-high mobile video screens. Here, writ large for the audience, are those "frozen moments" she is so fascinated by: a body snapped in mid-twist, a leap caught in one split-second frame (1/2000th of a second, to be precise) and dramatically illuminated by strobe lights.

The collaborative process started in workshops late last year, Greenfield experimenting with different moves. The stock-in-trade virtuosic dance shot took a back seat to subtler, more unusual imagery, she says. "We were looking more at raw energy, people hurling forward, back, upside down, sideways ... A lot of the pictures are about unusual angles. It's that whole thing about 'How the hell did they get their bodies in that position?', 'How are they going to get out of that position?' That's the sort of imagery that fascinates me."

Stewart says that on his part, an initial awkwardness, a sense of having to manipulate the steps to please the camera, faded as the piece evolved.

The strong showing at the Helpmanns is a source of pride for both. "The work gets such an immediate response because I think everyone can respond to the thrill of flight," Stewart says. "It's visceral. People immediately get it."

Held opens at the Drama Theatre, Opera House, tomorrow