David Michalek: “Slow Dancing”
He’s long favored Apple tools. “I use the Mac for just about everything I do as an artist,” he says; “film and video editing, finishing and playback, photography, sound design, word processing, email. Honestly, I’m glad your products are so beautiful, because I spend much of the day with them.”
The Digital Decision
During each shoot, Michalek and his dancers watched the raw video on a 23-inch Apple Cinema Display. “If we didn’t like a sequence,” recalls Michalek, “we got rid of it and started again.”
Having the ability to review the clips onsite was crucial. Originally, Michalek planned to shoot film — until an early test at his and Whelan’s New York apartment revealed why that approach wouldn’t work. He rented what he calls “this cheapo little high-speed black and white digital camera that’s made for golfers to analyze their swings,” which provided a rough idea of the extreme slow-mo he was after, albeit at poor resolution, as well as instant feedback.
Dancer Shantala Shivalingappa getting ready
Then he spent a weekend filming Whelan and other New York City Ballet dancers and reviewing the playback with them. Michalek found those first slow-motion images “one of the most sublime things I had ever seen.” To his surprise, however, “some of the dancers were mortified. They noticed tiny flaws that would never be apparent to the naked eye — it was like looking at their technique under a microscope.”
Professional Scrutinizers
Michalek immediately saw that digital playback — providing the dancers the opportunity to review their moves during the shoot and redo them as necessary — would be critical to a successful piece.
He adds with a laugh, “Ballet dancers are professional scrutinizers. They’ve been watching themselves in mirrors for 30 years. So naturally they wanted to fix whatever they saw in their technique that wasn’t perfect — which meant I had to allow them to see the clips in the moment.”
Ballerinas and Break Dancers
The thrill of the project, for Michalek, was assembling top dancers from all corners of the globe. He invited the world’s reigning Balinese dancer, the greatest female tapper, a 90-year-old Afro-Brazilian Capoeira master, a whirling dervish — even the king of the street form called ‘krump’ from South Central L.A.
Their artistry represents a huge range of styles and affirms the glorious variety of the human form. “I wanted to create not just a celebration of dance,” says Michalek, “but of human beings of all shapes, sizes, ages and races — and every one is a master.”
“The most memorable thing,” he continues, “was having one national treasure after the next walk onto the stage. What a privilege, seeing the legendary 72-year-old ballerina Allegra Kent just hanging out with New York’s greatest break dancer.”
To Beautify and Beatify
Michalek summons the impulses behind his newest piece. First, “I wanted it to exist as a work of art that sparks people’s creative imaginations and fills them with mystery and wonder — those things that are hard to put in words.”
Second, “I read a recent estimate that only eight percent of the U.S. population will ever see live dance in their lifetimes. So I wanted to disseminate an endorsement of the idea of dance — without limiting it to any one kind of dance.”
Michalek, currently a professor in the Graduate School of Religion and the Arts at Yale Divinity School, concludes, “On a deeper level, I wanted to create a mode of viewing that’s akin to meditation, where the art slows you down and brings on an intensified sense of focus. Much of what I’m ultimately interested in is the sacred function of art: art that doesn’t merely beautify, but beatifies, or makes blessed.”
