Ranting Details

At The Ballet

This summer I've shot everything from angry water creatures to the occasional roadside seductress, but the one thing I didn't shoot much of during my time in Montana is what I spend most of my time shooting in New York: dance.  That all changed yesterday when I did a promo shoot for one of the local studios with a few of the most senior girls and a few of the youngest.  It was an exciting challenge and I'm more pleased with the results than expected.  Thanks to my dad and Mark Shogren for the help with setting up and lighting the shoot!   

Picture(s) of the Day: 8/29/09

(My dad was kind enough to pose (and pull out his best Sean Connery) for a few shots since it is Portrait Week on A Photo A Day...)

Renegade Mice

Finished my Mouse Shoots for Nutcracker publicity.  Things started off pleasant enough, but then they got a little out of hand...

Levitating

Yesterday was self-portrait day on A Photo A Day For A Year (my new project with some friends), so I decided to levitate in my backyard after dinner. 

Picture of the Day: 8/24/09

Picture of the Day: 8/22/09

Lazy Post of the Day: Animated Grizzly

Two Weeks - Grizzly Bear from Gabe Askew on Vimeo.

I love this on so many levels.  Visually it's gorgeous, but the fact that it has some gay undertones really seals the deal.  Thanks to m@ for bringing this to my attention! 

Picture of the Day: 8/21/09

Mousing Around

Montana is known for abrupt seasonal shifts.  Summer brings temperatures that can climb up to triple digits in the afternoon only to drop down to the low fifties at night.  One minute there’s sunny, open sky and the next there’s an ice storm.  I know to prepare myself for these unexpected occurrences.  But one thing I have been unable to prepare myself for is the mid-summer arrival of winter’s most daunting component: The Nutcracker. 

For the past three weeks it seems that if I’m doing something work related, it involves the pesky children’s ballet that is about as well liked in the ballet community as ice-slick wood floors.  Any dancer will tell you that by the time you reach a professional career, Nutz (as it is lovingly referred to) is usually a way to make quick money through guesting engagements, most of which are thrown together days (or hours) before the white tights and tutus are hoisted up.  To begin preparing in November seems over zealous.  To begin preparing in August?  Unheard of. 

Perhaps I should explain the reasoning behind what I initially assumed would be a dull brand of torture.  This year marks the 25th anniversary of the organization with which I began my dance career at the age of nine—The Garden City Ballet.  This company, which puts on various annual productions, has been a Montana staple since long before my family rooted itself in the Missoula valley. But since my initial dabbling as a party child in the opening scene, my parents’ involvement has only grown.  

To commemorate the milestone year, there’s a large amount of restaging going on, so in addition to the Snow scene that I created three years ago, I have been enlisted to helm what is typically known as the Arabian dance in the second act. 

To my knowledge I have participated in over ten productions of this ballet.  And in all my years performing I have danced every role from Mouse King to Sugarplum Cavalier.  Every role expect for Arabian.  This has always been the one divertissement I was typecast out of since I’m neither a WWF wrestler capable of hoisting women over my head for minutes at a time, or the aforementioned woman whose abdominals resemble a washboard.  The closest I’ve come to performing it was when I played the music for a piano recital and nearly hyperventilated.  Which, coincidentally, has been my reaction almost every day I’ve been in the studio over the past two weeks.

Perhaps this has to do as much with the fact that it’s my first time choreographing in over two years as it has to do with my resistance toward having to create movement to anything played over loudspeakers in Sears.  I’m not quite sure.  I do, however, know that I have been remarkably capable of bitching and moaning my way through the hours spent walking back and forth from the center of the dance floor to the speaker system in the corner.

At first I struggled to divorce myself from all preconceived ideas.  Obviously the fact that I never performed the role doesn’t mean I haven’t watched countless belly dancing women run around the stage with coins dangling from their bodies.  That was something I knew I didn’t want in my version.   But, oh how easy it is to list off a million things a piece of work can’t be, and still struggle to find the handful of things it can be.

This is where my parents came in.  Since they are acting as artistic directors on the project, they had already discussed a direction for the work before I set foot in the studio.  It was decided early in the process that instead of a harem girl, the variation would center on a bird emerging from a cage and interacting with Clara.  We determined it needed to be less about a woman as an object and more about an exploration surrounding the sense of freedom one gets when all one knows is confinement.  In many ways this bird’s journey mirrors the same one Clara is experiencing in the ‘land of the sweets’ after living under the watchful eye of her family for her whole life. 

The struggle for me wasn’t hypothesizing on motivation for the dance, it was finding a way to translate all of this into movement that was not only beautiful, but something a young student would be capable of performing with confidence. 

Never have I struggled so much to generate phrases of choreography.  Whereas I used to listen to a piece of music and have to lasso the images erupting in my mind, I put on Tchaikovsky’s score and found only static.  And so I bitched about how this wasn’t something I wanted to do, and more importantly that after years away from dancing I didn’t think it was something I could do. 

I stepped away.  But what I found wasn’t a respite from the world of sugarplums; instead I went from choreographing for the Nutcracker to shooting publicity for it.  In an odd way I think these shoots were what made me capable of finishing the choreography.  Never before had I worked with such a large group of people in one frame.  And more than the sheer number of people was the fact that these people were all under the age of ten.  Suddenly I was challenging myself to direct a pack of mice that could bounce from being completely interested to being completely disinterested between triggers of the shutter.  

I found that this behavior was not exclusive to the ten year olds in front of my lens.  Wasn’t I doing the same thing from moment to moment with my choreography?  The minute things weren’t going my way I was doing the early-twenties version of walking away and throwing a temper tantrum to my mom.  (Note: the early-twenties version is the exact same thing.)  Watching most of the kids push through the bad moments and deliver for a shot made me intent on finishing up what I’d started in the studio. 

And so I returned with a new sense of capability and a dash more forgiveness with myself.  Sooner than I knew it I’d finished up the choreography, and, while not completely satisfied yet, feel as if I have a solid place to jump off from.  There’s still a profound sense of disorientation here.  The Nutcracker is supposed to stay in the winter and at moments I think dance is supposed to stay in my past.  While I’m not certain I’m comfortable with the mixing of seasons, perhaps it’s not a horrible thing to not be so sure. 

Picture of the Day: 8/18/09

(Waltzing in Virginia City, Montana.)