Flying high and caught and in the act

5:14pm Wednesday 7th March 2007

Frozen in flight, caught and pinned down in suspended animation - the Australian Dance Theatre presents dance like you've never seen it before.

The company's latest production, called Held, captures the dancers' quick-fire, athletic rampage via a series of photographs, instantly enlarged and flashed on to giant screens. Projected behind the dancers, the images allow the audience to see and experience movement in startlingly unexpected ways.

The show, which comes to the Alhambra next week to kick off the theatre's first-ever dance season, is a collaboration between artistic director/choreographer Garry Stewart and renowned dance photographer Lois Greenfield.

The dynamic tension of Stewart's frantic, "no compromise" choreography and Lois's images creates an extraordinary live performance, an interplay between fast-paced demanding dance sequences and quick-fire photography, set to a pounding soundtrack.

The choreography is technically demanding and fraught with risk. When she's on stage photographing the dancers, Lois becomes a performer alongside them.

"I'm on stage for a third of the time," she says. "The choreography is fast and I have to rehearse with the dancers so I know how to move with them. Garry ensures his dancers train in a multitude of extreme physical forms, such as martial arts, break-dance, gymnastics, ballet and yoga, as well as contemporary dance. It creates an extraordinary choreographic language with dramatic explosions of flight.

"The photographs allow the audience to see a leap or step that would normally be over in seconds. It makes them jolt. You can also see the faces of the dancers and personalities of the dancers.

"There has been mixed media in dance, but this approach has never been done before."

Held was a sensation when it premiered in Adelaide in 2004, winning a string of awards. Lois describes it as "a dance performance about photography, time and perceptions of reality."

"The images create the illusion of weightlessness by freezing the action," she adds. "Projected instantaneously, they reveal to the audience a moment that exists beneath the threshold of perception. Freezing a split second gives movement more solidity than it had as a fleeting gesture of dance."

Lois had no interest in dance when she started taking photographs during the 1960s. She originally wanted to be a National Geographic photographer, inspired by her travels while a student.

After graduating in anthropology and film-making, she started freelancing for Boston newspapers "photographing everything from maximum security prisons to rock concerts".

"I'd never studied photography; I learned as I went along," she says. "When I was assigned to cover a dance concert I didn't have a clue how to photograph movement, nor did I know anything about the dance world.

"It took me a while to get the hang of photographing people moving unpredictably in rapidly-changing lighting conditions on the stage.

"But by the time I moved back to New York in 1973, I had developed an affinity for dance. I felt a sense of relief that dance photographs, unlike the rest of my photo-journalistic assignments, only had to be interesting visually. They didn't have to express an editorial viewpoint."

Lois went to as many dance rehearsals as she could to develop her technique and build her reputation.

"The mid-Seventies was a great time for dance in New York; the modern dance scene was exploding and I got work on publications like the Village Voice, the New York Times and dance magazines."

She went on to photograph companies such as English National Ballet, San Francisco Ballet and New York City Ballet.

"I became increasingly dissatisfied with a documentary approach and didn't want to be limited to snatching moments from a distance at dress rehearsals," she says.

"I wanted to shape and refine the moment as a photograph. I lost interest in working in theatres and would invite dancers to experiment with me wherever I could manage it, I bought electronic strobes and got my own studio.

"I didn't want my photography to be merely a handmaiden of the dance, archiving someone else's work of art, I wanted to produce images of dancers that captured the feeling and excitement of the movement."

Improvising with choreographers, Lois discovered the dynamic relationship between the photo's frame and the moving dancer. Taken as a literal boundary for the dancers, the black border of the negative intensifies the explosive energy of the movement," she says. "Cropping into the dancers' bodies, the frame creates unexpected entrances and exits and the audience begins to consider "off screen" space.

"Simple questions provoke mystifying answers. How did the dancers get in that position?' Where are they coming from and how will they land?' The more impossible the picture looked, the more I considered it a success."

Lois met Garry Stewart when she started photographing his company in Adelaide. She works closely with him at the choreography stage, embedding movements into the dance that can be captured on film.

The company's visit to Bradford is part of the Dance Consortium, created in 2000 to promote dance as entertainment. Supported by Arts Council England, it presents regular tours of productions by leading international companies.

In addition to Australian Dance Theatre, the Dance Consortium will present further productions at the Alhambra this year, by companies including Nederlands Dans Theater 2 and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

The Australian Dance Theatre presents Held at the Alhambra on March 16 and 17. For tickets ring (01274) 432000.

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