SlowDancing (2007)

A suite of 65 HD videos, exhibited across three channels

Dimensions variable

Slow Dancing is a series of 43 larger-than-life, hyper-slow-motion video portraits of dancers and choreographers from around the world, displayed on multiple screens. Each subject's movement (approximately 5 seconds long) was shot on a specially constructed set using a high-speed, high-definition camera recording at 1,000 frames per second (standard film captures 30 frames per second). The result is approximately 10 minutes of extreme slow motion.

This project came to fruition in 2007, but was been gestating for much longer. It's not always easy to point to the specific factors that bring a new work, or the impulse to create one, into being. The overlapping issues, concerns and passions that merge with opportunity are not always obvious.

One impulse was clear. I love dance. I love watching it. I love what dancers do, who they are, and what they stand for. Dance is an underappreciated art form—the NEA tells us that only eight percent of the U.S. population will ever see a live dance performance. This led me to the idea of making a visual statement centered on celebrating dance—but not limited to any one kind of dance—to try to capture the "essence" of dance in a different medium. A second impulse was my natural urge to make portraits. The best portraits teach me how to look longer and harder and deeper at my fellow human beings. As a portrait artist, this is what I strive to do. I could make a portrait of anyone, anywhere and be happy doing so, but there is a certain pleasure in having dancers as one's subject.

Common to almost every work I undertake is the desire to engage the beautiful, to spark people's creative imagination, and to fill them with a sense of wonder and even love. So much of what I'm ultimately interested in is the sacred potential of art—work that not merely beautifies but also beatifies.

William Carlos Williams said that poets write for a single reason to give witness to splendor. This is also why, I think, dancers dance. Susan Sontag once pointed out that "no art lends itself so aptly as dance does to metaphors borrowed from the spiritual life (grace, elevation)..." But I also believe that certain harder and rougher metaphors borrowed from the life here below (gravity, striving, failing, falling) are equally important to what dance is and who dancers are. To paraphrase Simone Weil, grace is also the law of the descending movement—some people fall to the heights.

I am not a dancer, though I am married to one—Wendy Whelan. Having this exceptional woman and great artist by my side has been, and continues to be, one of the greatest privileges of my life. Knowing her and witnessing the intertwining splendor of her life and work has influenced my own in ways that are both the easiest and the most difficult to speak about.

For more information, please visit slowdancingfilms.com.

PRESS / CRITICISM

Relating to Relational Aesthetics

by Anne Hollinger Lindley

A View From Mass Hall, Slow Dancing

by Drew Gilpin FaustHarvard Magazine

Edinburgh Festival Review

Relating to Relational Aesthetics

by Anne Hollinger Lindley

A View From Mass Hall, Slow Dancing

by Drew Gilpin Faust
Harvard Magazine

Edinburgh Festival Reviewby Ian Gale

The New York Times
by Claudia La Rocco

The New York Sun
by James Gardner

Time Out New York
by Gia Kourlas

"Time Becomes Space"

by Alex Ross

Links

The Southampton Center
Slow Dancing
Southampton, NY
July 12 - August 4, 2013

Pomona College
Slow Dancing
Claremont, CA
October 1, 2013

Tanz im August Festival
Slow Dancing
Berlin, Gendarmenmarkt
August 15 - 31, 2013

Harvard University
Slow Dancing
Facade of Widener Library
April 20 - 29, 2012

Edinburgh Festival
Edinburgh, Scotland
August 3 - 29, 2012

The Cleveland Museum of Art
Slow Dancing
Cleveland, Ohio
June, 2011

Lincoln Center Festival
New York, NY
July 13 - July 29, 2007