Asher Kelman
OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
The Challenge of Photography in Classical Music and Ballet: Lighting on stages seem to be made to satisfy the customs of the lighting crew and an audience that is not supercritical about where light is and how it gets there. To the photographer, of course, these factors weigh heavily in recording the scene. The photographer has to learn to fit in as mostly it's easier to get blood from a stone than altering stage lighting! Still, I have dreams, (or delusions) of getting my way some day! It's essentially available light stealth shooting to a melody!
Stage lighting, (mostly from above), can be accepted by audiences for concerts as their sophistication is in the listening part of the experience. Visual esthetics are tertiary issues! In any case, if the music is great, our eyes make enough sense of the scene that it works fine! No one ever complains that they cannot see the oboist and adjacent bassoons! (They are hidden mostly, anyway, by the conductor and the strings). It's the sound and excitement of the entire ambience of a stage filled with musicians in tuxedos and black dresses that works for us. Actual detail is unimportant! For dance, however, we now have the visual expression of the music in color and movement. So now we have to actually see what happens. The music comes from somewhere beyond the dancers and it just has to be great. We don't need to know where its being made. The dancers do not need to be seen in detail as it's the shapes of the bodies corresponding to music that counts.
Lighting then is for that transformative magic of movement, not the details of the face and arms.
The Music, The Dance and Dancers: Let me introduce you to the upcoming photograph by setting the audio stage as the guide to look at the image of the dancers floating before you. The following is a quote:
"The word "gnossienne" describes several pieces of piano music composed by Satie that didn't fit into any of the existing styles of classical music like a piano prelude or a sonata. Satie easily solved this dilemma by simply titling the pieces with a completely new and made up word, in this case - "gnossienne."
Erik Satie wrote 6 Gnossiennes. "Satie composed his first three gnossiennes around 1890, without time signatures and bar lines (often referred to as "absolute time") and traditional tempo markings. Satie's peculiar scores could be read like musical poetry - one can interpret the piece with very few restrictions, as his tempo markings were made of phrases like "don't leave", "lightly, with intimacy" and "don't be proud." The first gnossiennes (Nos. 1 and 3) were published in September of 1893, in Le Figaro musical Nr. 24, while No. 2 was published in Le Coeur the next month. The remaining three gnossiennes, Nos. 4-6, were composed in 1891, 1899, and 1897, respectively. However, these were not published until 1968. .."The inherent feelings of timelessness and infinity of each piece come from the works' cyclical nature".(Source)
I ask you to now open another browser web page and being up this haunting music, Gonossiemme #1, , (played as the composer, Erik Satie, intended) on piano in this Utube recording, but in this dance at the Colburn School December 19th 2009 soulfully performed by guest accompanyist, Colburn Faculty Member, Kenton Youngstrum on guitar.
Asher Kelman: The Dancers Perform Gnossienne#1,
Trudl Zipper Dance Institute at the Colburn School ,
Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, December 19th 2009
With dance, how the figures are lit can alter the sense of the choreography. Naturally then, the choreographer directs how lights will play on their dancers. For some reason, stage designers and choreographers seem to love "dramatic lighting". That essentially means a mostly black stage and lighting essentially from above.
The dark is very dark and the bright goes to white out easily, just as as with lighting for classical music except the gradients are even steeper! To make things even more exciting, sensual and creative, colored gels modify the already harsh lights. Add to that, for an end of the year holiday performance in a Dance School, it's a one time creative extravaganza: light intensity changes with no written program for the photographer and no rehearsal!
This happens since the performances are school enterprises where all the resources pull together until the last day to get one showing and then the show is over!
I actually thought I had the problem of photographing musicians on stage pretty well licked. Dance however is humbling, as it's much harder to compose, get the timing right in the dancers positions and still get the technical matters of exposure and shutter speed right.
I used the 5DII and the 70-200 2.8 L IS, here at ISO 800, 1/250 second f 3.6 at 200mm underexposed by about 3/4 stop and recovered in Adobe Camera Raw. I'll be reprocessing this in Phase One's Capture One software.
In the single image, above, I've tried to bring to you the way the dancers appear to float over the stage in some continuous river of innocence to worldly matters. They become feather-light living taffeta and silk containers for the rhythms and demands of the music appearing from the shadows to the bright lights and then disappearing again. They are the materialization of Erik Sartie's Gnossienne, timeless, ethereal, penetrating one's being with soulful beauty that has no beginning and no end.
Asher
Stage lighting, (mostly from above), can be accepted by audiences for concerts as their sophistication is in the listening part of the experience. Visual esthetics are tertiary issues! In any case, if the music is great, our eyes make enough sense of the scene that it works fine! No one ever complains that they cannot see the oboist and adjacent bassoons! (They are hidden mostly, anyway, by the conductor and the strings). It's the sound and excitement of the entire ambience of a stage filled with musicians in tuxedos and black dresses that works for us. Actual detail is unimportant! For dance, however, we now have the visual expression of the music in color and movement. So now we have to actually see what happens. The music comes from somewhere beyond the dancers and it just has to be great. We don't need to know where its being made. The dancers do not need to be seen in detail as it's the shapes of the bodies corresponding to music that counts.
Lighting then is for that transformative magic of movement, not the details of the face and arms.
The Music, The Dance and Dancers: Let me introduce you to the upcoming photograph by setting the audio stage as the guide to look at the image of the dancers floating before you. The following is a quote:
"The word "gnossienne" describes several pieces of piano music composed by Satie that didn't fit into any of the existing styles of classical music like a piano prelude or a sonata. Satie easily solved this dilemma by simply titling the pieces with a completely new and made up word, in this case - "gnossienne."
Erik Satie wrote 6 Gnossiennes. "Satie composed his first three gnossiennes around 1890, without time signatures and bar lines (often referred to as "absolute time") and traditional tempo markings. Satie's peculiar scores could be read like musical poetry - one can interpret the piece with very few restrictions, as his tempo markings were made of phrases like "don't leave", "lightly, with intimacy" and "don't be proud." The first gnossiennes (Nos. 1 and 3) were published in September of 1893, in Le Figaro musical Nr. 24, while No. 2 was published in Le Coeur the next month. The remaining three gnossiennes, Nos. 4-6, were composed in 1891, 1899, and 1897, respectively. However, these were not published until 1968. .."The inherent feelings of timelessness and infinity of each piece come from the works' cyclical nature".(Source)
I ask you to now open another browser web page and being up this haunting music, Gonossiemme #1, , (played as the composer, Erik Satie, intended) on piano in this Utube recording, but in this dance at the Colburn School December 19th 2009 soulfully performed by guest accompanyist, Colburn Faculty Member, Kenton Youngstrum on guitar.
Asher Kelman: The Dancers Perform Gnossienne#1,
Trudl Zipper Dance Institute at the Colburn School ,
Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, December 19th 2009
With dance, how the figures are lit can alter the sense of the choreography. Naturally then, the choreographer directs how lights will play on their dancers. For some reason, stage designers and choreographers seem to love "dramatic lighting". That essentially means a mostly black stage and lighting essentially from above.
The dark is very dark and the bright goes to white out easily, just as as with lighting for classical music except the gradients are even steeper! To make things even more exciting, sensual and creative, colored gels modify the already harsh lights. Add to that, for an end of the year holiday performance in a Dance School, it's a one time creative extravaganza: light intensity changes with no written program for the photographer and no rehearsal!
This happens since the performances are school enterprises where all the resources pull together until the last day to get one showing and then the show is over!
I actually thought I had the problem of photographing musicians on stage pretty well licked. Dance however is humbling, as it's much harder to compose, get the timing right in the dancers positions and still get the technical matters of exposure and shutter speed right.
I used the 5DII and the 70-200 2.8 L IS, here at ISO 800, 1/250 second f 3.6 at 200mm underexposed by about 3/4 stop and recovered in Adobe Camera Raw. I'll be reprocessing this in Phase One's Capture One software.
In the single image, above, I've tried to bring to you the way the dancers appear to float over the stage in some continuous river of innocence to worldly matters. They become feather-light living taffeta and silk containers for the rhythms and demands of the music appearing from the shadows to the bright lights and then disappearing again. They are the materialization of Erik Sartie's Gnossienne, timeless, ethereal, penetrating one's being with soulful beauty that has no beginning and no end.
Asher
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