Photographing live performance? You get one shot at it. No retakes, no mulligans, no “can we do that again but with better light?” The thing happens once, in real time, and you either capture it or you don’t. That’s it.
So I’m at YBCA, dress rehearsal for Alonzo King’s Deep River. But there’s an audience, overdressed board members who showed up for the social credit, teachers and staff exhausted from the days work, and a hundred-plus amped-up dance students who are about to lose their minds. It’s a weird mix: dilettantes in the orchestra section, true believers in the balcony. Then Lisa Fischer walks out.
Holy. Fucking. Shit.
If you’ve never heard Lisa Fischer sing live, you don’t understand. I spent several years on the road with Mabou Mines touring their production of Gospel at Colonus, Sophocles reimagined through Pentecostal service, the Five Blind Boys of Alabama embodying Oedipus and ancient Greek tragedy through gospel and call-and-response, and even after all that, this stops me cold. This isn’t background vocals for the Stones, this isn’t studio work. This is a human being channeling something ancient and profound through her body. Gospel, spirituals, the sound of survival and transcendence wrapped into one impossible instrument. You feel it in your chest, in your bones. The camera feels irrelevant. Who the fuck am I to try to capture this?
But that’s the job. So you work.
Jason Moran. MacArthur genius. Kennedy Center jazz director. All the fancy credentials. And none of it means shit compared to what’s happening in that room. I’m tasked with capturing a conversation between tonally complex music, a singular voice, a dozen bodies… with something larger than all of them. Try photographing that. Try freezing a moment when the whole point is the flow, the relationship, the thing that can not be repeated.
And the dancers, these freakishly talented humans with their impossible extensions and their bodies that shouldn’t be able to do what they do, they’re moving through choreography born from three years of pandemic weirdness. Three years of working in bubbles, in Golden Gate Park, on farms, in the Sonora desert. You can see it in the movement: the isolation, the reaching, the determined hope against impossible odds.
You’re shooting through all of this. Not hosing it down like some hack $300 wedding shooter, some talentless dipshit with a kit lens who thinks a thousand shitty frames equals one good photograph. I’m using a Leica M+P, manual focus, manual everything. It’s fucking masochistic. Every frame matters because I can’t just spray and pray with this thing. I’m here because I can make split second choices: Fischer mid-note, mouth open, head back? A dancer suspended in mid-leap? The ensemble moving as one organism?
The thing about photographing performance… especially something like Deep River, which is essentially an hourlong meditation on love and resilience, is that you’re not really capturing the work. You can’t. In truth, all you can do is just leave evidence that it happened. That people gathered. That something special, maybe holy, occurred.
That has to be enough.
Deep River, a collaboration with composer Jason Moran and vocalist Lisa Fischer. Bending the lines between classical and contemporary ballet, Alonzo King draws on the strengths of his extraordinary dancers, altering the way we look at ballet today.