We all know St. Pete’s a mural town, but a dance town?
Dancer/choreographer Helen Hansen French has already upped the city’s terpsichorean profile through her work with the St. Petersburg Dance Alliance and the BEACON Dance Series. But with her latest project, Capturing Dance, she’s brought photography into the mix — and the result is a real eye-opener.
With the help of a grant from the St. Petersburg Arts Alliance, French partnered with two professional photographers, Tom Kramer and Charlotte Nacole Suarez, to shoot a wide variety of local movers this summer in locations all over the city. The idea was to photograph them at sites that suited their style but were also different from traditional venues — everyday places where dance doesn’t usually go.
“People are really accustomed to seeing rehearsal shots,” French said, “but when you see an aerialist hanging from a tree…”
That’s what curious passersby espied one morning when aerial dancer Ella Storme found 26 different ways to dangle and twirl from the branches of the iconic kapok tree next to the Museum of Fine Arts. Traffic slowed, folks peeked out from the museum — and a whole new way of making, seeing and photographing dance in St. Pete was born.
Storme’s was the first performance captured by the photographers. After that, says French, “Every shoot took on a life of its own.” Bulgarian, Indian, tango, hip-hop — seven dance styles in all, performed by a total of 24 dancers over nine shoots — conveying a breadth and level of professionalism that not many St. Pete residents are aware of.
The photographers broadened their horizons, too. Suarez, who’s relatively new to dance photography, appreciated “getting a true sense of just how vibrant and relevant the art of dance is in the cultural capital of Florida.” Kramer has been photographing dance for almost 50 years (he’s married to dancer/choreographer Paula Kramer), but he made discoveries, too.
“Capturing Dance has taken me off the stage, away from the studios and out into the broader dance community,” he says. “I have photographed in galleries at the MFA, the ballroom at the Coliseum, beautiful gardens, on the street in front of a church, in an alley, at a charity fundraiser and looking above at a dancer/aerialist suspended from a tree — not your everyday dance photography.”
All of the dancers will receive professional prints of their photos — a valuable commodity in an art form where visuals matter so much. By mid-September, the photos will be collected on a website, URL to be announced. And someday, maybe, we’ll see them enlarged and celebrated in the realms of city government and county tourism, showing off another facet of the city’s much-heralded arts community.
“People are so excited we have the murals,” says French. “I want to get them just as excited about the possibility of dance.”
