David Michalek: “Slow Dancing”
If “slow dancing” evokes the high anxiety of your high school prom — or any awkward moment — think again. Because artist David Michalek’s “Slow Dancing” is the antithesis: it’s mesmerizingly beautiful (and really, really slooooooow).
Michalek learned filmmaking at NYU, perfected his photographic skills apprenticing with fashion legend Herb Ritts, then set up shop as a commercial portraitist. His pictures appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Vogue.
Before long, however, his creative urges tugged him toward what he calls his project life. “I never stopped making portraits,” Michalek says, “but my motivations changed radically. I began to focus on making work for me, and to merge the idea of portraiture with performance, installation and large-scale multi-dimensional projects.”
Since that shift his solo and collaborative work has been shown nationally and internationally, with recent solo exhibitions at Yale University, The Kitchen and The Brooklyn Museum.
Escaping Time
Michalek didn’t have to look far for his latest inspiration. He happens to be married to Wendy Whelan, who The New York Times recently lauded as “the greatest ballerina in America.” Mikhail Baryshnikov simply says, “She’s the best.”
Left to right: Fang Yi, Judith Jameson and David Michalek reviewing printed stills
The artist felt Whelan’s chosen art deserved a new and fuller appreciation. “Dance is often relegated to the lowest of the art forms because it’s ephemeral,” he explains. “It unfolds before you in time and space. Even watching a dance film, you don’t understand it as you would by being with it in the moment where it physically exists. It’s there, and then it’s gone — that’s the beauty of it.”
It was precisely to escape time’s constraint on the art of dance that Michalek conceived and directed his new piece. “There’s a lot of beautiful dance photography,” he’s quick to acknowledge, “but I wondered, Is there a way to take what’s missing from dance photography — the time element — and make something that’s not just another dance movie?”
Breaking New Ground
With “Slow Dancing,” Michalek breaks new ground both artistically and technically. The hyper-slow-motion HD video portraits of 45 master dancers are so exquisitely decelerated that each subject’s brief original movement — just five or so seconds of a single gesture — is stretched into a ten-minute film.
Michalek’s work recalls nothing so much as the late 19th century explorations of Eadweard Muybridge, who used photography to study the exact nature of the horse’s gait. But whereas Muybridge uses sequences of just a few images to indicate the idea of motion, Michalek did the opposite: he captured thousands of sequential images to indicate the idea of stillness.
“The point,” he says, “is to capture the beauty of the body in motion while laying bare its most intricate workings. I want people to experience the movement in a new way.”
The project, funded by a commission from the LA Music Center and post-produced on Macs using Shake and Final Cut Studio, is a one-of-a-kind record of some of the world’s greatest dance artists. It premiered at the Lincoln Center Festival on July 10, projected on a triptych of 50-foot screens mounted outside the New York State Theater.
1,000 Frames Per Second
Michalek employed a special high-speed HD camera that’s typically used by the military for ballistic analysis and is capable of recording images at an impressive 1,000 frames per second.
He shot the dancers in four sessions at the New York studio of photographer William Wegman. There, Michalek filtered 200,000 watts of lighting through soft silk. “Because the camera is recycling 1,000 times per second,” he explains, “you need a lot of light hitting the sensor to get good exposure. It was wild — everyone was wearing sunglasses.”
Artificial Slow-Down
Even with Michalek’s amazing capture rate, the dancers’ movements weren’t slow enough to reveal the detail he sought. So he used a combination of Twixtor and Shake’s optical flow feature to time-remap them.
“Apple and Shake have been absolutely crucial to this project from the beginning,” he says. “Because no camera on the market allowed me to shoot in HD for as long as I did, at the frame rate I wanted, I had to find a way to artificially slow down the data. Shake — and six Mac Pros rendering 24/7 for about a week — allowed me to do that.”
Michalek even located a German software company whose product allows playback of uncompressed HD from a hard drive. That was key, since he was determined not to lose data by running his footage through a codec. “Because I’m projecting the images so large,” he notes, “where the effect of artifacting is amplified, I wanted to hold onto as much data as I could.”
Off-the-Shelf Parts
The playback system includes a Mac, dual 4 GB fiber channel, PCI Express Card, and two Xserve RAIDs for each projector. Says Michalek, “This system lets me do something that, until now, the market has not allowed.”
He was keen to use off-the-shelf components. “I wanted the system to be modular,” he explains, “so I can re-use it in different configurations. Also, I didn’t want to drag around racks of esoteric equipment. Being based on Macs, I can install the project anywhere. Every city has a Mac store. If I’m in France and I have a problem, I don’t want to wait three weeks for a part.”
