Llewellyn Berry
Dancers
Posted on February 12, 2011by Llewellyn Berry
Very shortly after arriving at Ellington, I realized that I had been given an extraordinary gift. I was a photographer in the midst of one of the most artistically inspiring places on earth well, at least in Washington, DC.
I wasn’t teaching photography. I was teaching radio production and broadcast journalism and although I was moving toward my goal of a functioning radio station/production studio, I was still a photographic artist with a wealth of potential images all around me. There was the theatre department all costumed and dress rehearsing. There were young sculptors and painters and printmakers in studios, jazz and classical musicians practicing in beautifully lit solitary spaces and then there were the dancers. My oh my, the dancers… They just seemed to move with the music and the air around them. There they were all chatty and playful and serious in classes in the morning and then somehow magically transformed in the afternoon into these gazelles and Giselles pirouetting and pointing and poised like fauns and so much more. I didn’t know where to start first.
Well, I shot all over the place. I photographed theatre rehearsals and performances of all the productions. I have photographs of all of them. I shot the young painters and sculptors in their studio classes and got pictures of the work that was done. The saxophonists and the guitarists and the jazz ensembles and the pianists…I got ‘em all. The flutists and the violinists…
And once again, there were the dancers. The Dance Department Chair, Lynn Welters, asked me to photograph the seniors and that just led me to photograph so many of the rest of them and of course I gave them the prints. After all, they were doing me a favor. I was having the time of my photographic life.
Ms. Welters was the consummate Ballet Mistress, tapping out times with the long stick, shouting out French ballet terms and directions and corrections.
Toulouse Lautrec and Edgar Degas are two of my favorite artists and especially their work of dancers – Degas’ Dancers and Lautrec’s work at the Moulin Rouge. It’s more than the movement; it’s also the dancers with disciplined and gifted bodies or instruments getting to the spot and once they arrive. I mean they move to reach a point (so to speak). If I capture them getting there, I’m happy with that. Capturing the motion is cool. I’m even happier when I get them having arrived at the spot. That’s when body and head are in complete alignment. The dept. chair said I had a knack for getting that moment…” the decisive moment”.
I had never heard of Lester Horton, but Ellington had a teacher who did just Horton technique. Lloyd Whitmore; whoa, this brotha’s choreography was extraordinary and I loved photographing his work. I had to go to lots of his rehearsals and dress rehearsals because I would get caught up in watching the dance – the movement. You know, I’m the photographer, right. I’m supposed to be totally into making the pictures. Well, I was but I had to go and watch. The thing was, each time I would go to another rehearsal I would see something else I wanted to shoot and of course, I always had my camera with me. My eyes would be all big and the music would get me going and then the dance…oh, the dance!!! It was just extraordinary and I was getting it on film.
Lloyd Whitmore
Dance Instructor
Duke Ellington School of the Arts
c.1988
Among the dance department instructors there was Sandra Fortune. This is how things, in general, come around and specifically in DC. Years before we arrived at Ellington the Urban Journalism Workshop’s feature news magazine, 1310 did a story on Sandra as a student and I believe it was a piece on the Capital Ballet. I sent one of my students over to get pictures and he had shots of Sandra. Well, here I was photographing Sandra, the dance instructor at Ellington.
That was the other blessing about Ellington for me. Not only were the students incredibly talented and accessible, their teachers were outstanding and true celebrities in their own right. The faculty at Ellington never got, in my opinion, enough of the recognition it deserved. These folks were and are extraordinary artists.
One of my all-time favorite photographs is the one I made of Lloyd Whitmore and Sandra Fortune on stage at Ellington. I think it captures the passion and the professionalism of these two outstanding dancers.
Dancers
Lloyd Whitmore and Sandra Fortune
Duke Ellington School of the Arts
c. 1988