The Fabric Phase - How we became haberdashers overnight.

Our approach to long exposure dance photography was beginning to change. Whilst we enjoyed photographing ballet dancers, we did find it a little too prescriptive. Ballet is a very technical, precise dance form and we began to find it a little too constraining. Ballet dancers were very exacting in what was good, bad and indifferent in terms of their finger and toe position! The question was how do we progress and start pushing the boundaries?

Well what we did know that the movement of the dance skirts was what created the movement and blur we liked. The fabric was central to everything as far as we were concerned. The dancer was almost just the medium by which the fabric moved. So what if we just used more fabric and scaled back the dance wear and stepped back from ballet and moved into other dance forms. What would that look like?

Back to StarNow and another advert. This time we wanted the dancers to be not wearing very much at all and wanted them to just use the fabric across their bodies and move to see what we got. We surprisingly got a lot of applications considering what we were asking the dancers to do - i.e. jump around topless waving fabric like some Roman goddess.

Dancer - Shanley

We spent a lot of time buying fabric from markets in the East End from simple plain cotton to sparkly sequinned numbers. In a nutshell we didn’t know what would work or even how we were going to do this. The first dancer arrived in the studio. We tried various approaches - tying the fabric around them like some superhero cape, wrapping it around them like some form of dress and finally just letting them do what they wanted to do with it (which was the most amusing part really but also the most creative).

Next came the studio lighting. Initially we carried on with the same set up for ballet - a combination of a large gridded flash and a continuous light to both blur and freeze the image. But we also started to play with just one continuous light so we had no frozen movement at all. The tripod also came and went during the shoot as well. Handholding the camera with over half a second exposure also added some creativity and some very interesting results.

Dancer - Claudia

The dancers themselves also added some elements of creativity without direction. We had set out at the start saying the dancers should just wear plain underwear. Well that was all well and good until a number of dancers decided that wasn’t going to create the best results and just stripped off which did initially cause us some consternation! But it worked!

For each shoot we ended up with around 700-1000 images which to be frank on initial examination resembled not a lot on the back of the camera. The editing phase proved to be critical but also presented a very steep learning curve. That comes next!

Dancer - Christina