Shooting dance rehearsal is like trying to bottle lightning while someone keeps striking the match over and over again.
Répétition. The French got it right. Repetition, yes, but also something more… a ritual of refinement, of searching. Watch these LINES dancers move through Alonzo King‘s choreography and you’re watching the same phrase fifty times, but it’s never the same. Each iteration shaves away another molecule of doubt, adds another layer of intention. It’s meditation. It’s obsession. It’s beautiful and slightly insane.
The light in that studio, harsh overhead fluorescents mixed with whatever San Francisco sunshine manages to sneak through the windows… it’s not pretty. It’s not romantic. But it’s honest. This is the light of work. Real work. The kind that makes your body sing and scream simultaneously.
Photography, that’s the hunt for the single perfect moment. The decisive instant. Cartier-Bresson and all that. You wait, you breathe, you click. One frame that tells the whole story. But video? Or Motion, or whatever you want to call it is something else entirely. It’s the long view. It’s duration and accumulation. You’re not looking for the moment; you’re capturing a process. The sweat building. The adjustment in a shoulder blade. The way a dancer marks through a sequence first, then commits. Then explodes.
You can not cheat with video. The lens sees everything, the stumble, the recalibration, the moment where muscle memory kicks in and transforms effort into grace. The camera sees what the body knows before the mind catches up.
These LINES dancers, working Alonzo’s vocabulary, all that length, that impossible extension, they’re translating something ineffable into flesh and space. And you’re there, camera rolling, trying to honor that translation without getting in its way.
Bear witness. Don’t fuck it up.