Dance for the camera

It seems that Sadler’s Wells are not new in the relationships between dance and photography which they drew, and I so enjoyed, in Undance last week. In fact, the artist Edgar Degas was making just such connections over a century ago between his paintings and sculptures, and the new photographic technology that was emerging at the end of the nineteenth century. I learnt this at the Royal Academy’s brilliant special exhibition Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement.

This exhibition was, sadly, very poorly advertised I thought, as all of the publicity material I have seen featured only one of Degas’ well-known pictures of ballet practices, and gave no indication of the ground-breaking relationships which the exhibition has made between his art and contemporary photography. It tells a very convincing story of Degas’ initial hostile reaction to the static requirements of early portrait photography, and then growing interest in the possibilities created by techniques like photosculpture by Francois Willeme and, indeed, Muybridge’s Human Locomotion series. This is taken on into Degas’ own work with photography, and to looking at how his style of painting and sculpting responded to these experiences. Particularly striking is the reconstruction of Degas’ series of sketches for the sculpture Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, showing how they develop the figure from all sides as Degas’ observed her. If only the sketches had been reproduced to the scale of the statue surrounding it rather than on a small text panel.

As a proto-historian of science, I was pleased to see the inclusion of actual photographic technology in the show, including a camera which Degas may have used himself, but was disappointed to see little connection made between the cameras and the brilliant films and photographs displayed alongside the paintings. Linking the medium more firmly to the machine and therefore to ways of seeing through it would have added a useful layer to this very effective picturing of movement.