Invisible dances

Long exposures aren't only interesting for expressing a particular bodily and subcionscious state, as I did with 'becoming one' (see previous post). Leaving your shutter open for an extended length of time, compressing seconds or minutes into one image, can draw attention to the passing or transience of time, connect us to lost pasts, or layer different temporalities on top of each other.

With Elisabeth Schilling's project "Invisible Dances", I captured imprints of the past. Fleeting presences that came as quickly as they went.

During lockdown, renowned dancer and choreographer Elisabeth Schilling (check her website here) gathered dancers all around the world to spend a night dancing in a particular place in their city and trace their dance steps with graffiti or chalk on the ground. The next day, when local people discovered the traces of the dancers, they were invited to follow the lines with their own dances. In this way, the project connected dancers and wider communities across time.

Collaborating with Creative Scotland and Lyth Arts Centre, Elisabeth brought the project to Wick in the very North-West of Scotland. Julia McGhee and Amber Dollin were up for dancing outside Whetherspoons in Wick in the early hours of a Saturday morning. Living in the Highlands at the time, I was invited to capture the dancers' performances through photography and video. I got free creative reign, which was an exciting exercise - and fun way to spend a chilly Saturday morning in Wick.

Robert Louis Stevenson once described Wick in a letter to his mother: "Certainly Wick in itself possesses no beauty: bare, grey shores, grim grey houses, grim grey sea; not even the gleam of red tiles; not even the greenness of a tree". Mind you, since 1848 nothing much seems to have changed. Lonely Planet calls it a “a sad little town full of cut price shops and boarded-up buildings”. They don't exactly sell it to you, but they don't have to, if you ask me. If you want to get to know Scotland outside of dramatic hills and bagpipes, go to Wick and you'll find it. You'll find it in the treeless plains, cliffs and seastacks of Caithness, the swirling sea, the 'huge cathedral sky' as George Gunn once called it, in the windswept cobblestone streets of Wick, at Old Pulteney Distillery amongst age-old harbour warehouses, and outside Wheterspoons on a early Saturday morning in October, when a local says "Gosh for a moment I thought Banksy was here!"

As with Nicky's music-making, "Invisible Dances" is an introspective: it documents the fleetingness, the invisibility, breathlessness of creative expression without an audience. A dance performance spanning across time.

And of course, as with any project, photography brought me closer to a particular place, connecting me to people and teaching me about a the things you can't see at first glance.

Read more about Elisabeth's project: https://www.elisabethschilling.com/portfolio-item/invisibledancesenglish/