For the past year I’ve been one of the house videographers for The Kitchen, a visual and performance arts space that’s been around almost as long as me.  For some of the projects I shoot, they ask me to come in and watch a dress rehearsal to get an idea of what I’m in for.  Scenario: Script to Perform was one of those times.  I’ve been wanting to expand into photographing dance, so I asked if I could shoot during the dress.

To borrow from the Kitchen’s description of the piece:

choreographer Gillian Walsh continues her work with scores. The score—a constellation of derived language and numerical codes—orients the dancer toward form and away from performance, towards dance as non-fiction form. Scenario is infinite emptiness: undermining expectations of extroversion and theatrical effect, it is structural choreographic thought without a dance.

It was a fascinating piece to watch, almost meditative at times.  The set was the blank walls of the Kitchen’s performance space, with the lighting by Zack Tinkelman changing things up — from cold fluorescent, to a warmer “normal” look and into deeply saturated blues and magentas (again courtesy of LEDs and again giving an odd oversaturated, almost blacklight look on camera).  The movement was not dynamic, but there were some nice images created with the dancers’ positions in space.  To a certain extent, I was having to rely on my Viewpoints training to look for spatial relationship, repetition, architecture, shape, etc.  So thank you, Anne and SITI Company, for making this one successful!