Twisted Theatre
Dancers love Chris Nash - his photographs speak their language and he knows just when to catch a jump. Nadine Meisner talks to him about his new images for the dance company V-TOL.
See the picture, understand the dance: Chris Nash's photographs of dancers grab the attention with clean, weird lines frozen at full tilt, but they also tell something of what the dancing is about. The challenge is to achieve a fusion between Nash's own creative objectives and the need to publicise a dance event, which is what he has been commissioned to do.
I have to remain faithful to the choregrapher's intentions. I try to imagine what kind of photograph the choreographer would take if he could. I provide a gateway for the viewer to step into the choreographer's mind. he says.
Chris Nash has been opening gates into contemporary dance for 20 years
How does Nash define his style?
I always try to reinvent myself, to find what's best for putting across an idea. People remark that they find it hard at first to recognise my pictures, but usually they get there in the end. So I think there must be a certain quality, but it's coming from an odd, or different, angle.
What quality does one need to be dance photographer?
To remember that dance is a particular language. I hope by now I can understand it. It's important, because when a dancer performs a jump, say, or a turn, you have to know where it's coming from or going to. You have to recognise where the most interesting point is, when to arrest the image so that it contains a certainty about what the movement is doing. Otherwise you'll confuse the viewer.
Is it frustrating to tailor his artistic objectives to somebody else's?
No. It's what makes it challenging. Besides, with collaborations, people take you in directions you might not have thought of yourself, so actually it's very fruitful.
Photography feels like my own brand of theatre-making. The frame is like a proscenium arch, you can light the space within it, bring in figures, direct them. It's a theatrical experience.
This article first appeared in the Independent Saturday Magazine 25th April 1998. for all of Chris Nash's V-TOL photos, see Portfolio/Dance
STOPMOTION National Theatre, London.
Review by Judith Mackrell. Rating ****
Chris Nash took his first dance photograph in 1977. It was a year in which surprising numbers of amateur British enthusiasts were putting on legwarmers and heading for their nearest dance studio, and young UK choreographers were gaining heady confidence in their own art form. Since then Nash has become unofficial documentor of the British modern dance scene, and his current retrospective in the Lyttelton Theatre's foyer, StopMotion, is a lively, often beautiful record not only of his own talent but of the past 20 years of dance activity.
His own background in visual arts equipped Nash uniquely for the job. Just as his favoured choreographers have tended to cram their work with cross-cultural references, theatre and fantasy, so Nash has played with a variety of approaches. Most characteristic are the meticulously assembled collages (photos spliced with drawn or printed images), through which he wittily aims to locate the mainspring of a group's aesthetic. An early publicity shot for the Cholmondeleys, for instance, replaced the performers' bodies with dancing, waggling fingers, capturing the wayward energy of the group's approach. A shot for the Featherstonehaughs, titled Immaculate Conception, has the all-male dancers gazing down at their earthly selves from the radiant vantage point of heavenly clouds.
References to renaissance art jostle with haute-surrealism, film noir and Soviet posters throughout this packed exhibition, sometimes picking up on images integral to the dance work, sometimes jumping out of Nash's own imagination. Yet even while many of the photos are gorgeous art objects (his black-and-white silver bromide prints add a lustrous definition to the dancers' bodies, and his recent lambada colour prints irradiate them with dramatic brilliance), he rarely fails to capture some singular quality within each of his subjects.
Nash has been watching dance long enough to snap, when he chooses, the deep visceral action of a dancer mid-move - the twisted swerve of a jump, the louche tilt of a swivelling hip - but even in more posed images the dancers' physical personalities feel exuberantly present. Javier De Frutos's bare butt seems to wiggle, rudely and sweetly, in your face; Paul Liburd's impressively powerful torso retains its uniquely delicate grace; head shots of Michael Clark have him posed like a young Laurence Olivier but with a tart's make-up smeared over eyes and mouth. Only occasionally does Nash fail to deliver: surprisingly, Akram Khan's particular blend of glamour and charisma eludes his lens. Otherwise this exhibition is remarkable for its restless, creative range and entrancing ability to conjure up a crowd of dancing memories, past and present.
This article first appeared in the Guardian Newspaper, 19.09.01.