Television

Television / Film

Early work with Moving Being (mixed media theatre company) was very involved with the use of both film and photography, and I had always studied photography as a secondary subject at art school. I was involved with processing and shooting both photographic slides and films for use as projection material in the majority of our work in those days, so I became very familiar with both shooting and editing film as a part of our theatre-making process.

Later, in the Eighties, many of the dance works that I was involved with were being recorded for television broadcast and many of us were critical of the way that dance (in particular) was being represented on TV from an aesthetic point of view.

In the early days of Channel Four, a piece by the choreographer Tom Jobe called “Run Like Thunder” was filmed for TV at Limehouse Studios (directed by Terry Braun). In this instance we made considerable effort to make a more ‘cinematic’ version of the piece, in a studio, and as a result Terry and I were asked to present a paper to C4 proposing a new approach to filming dance for TV.

The result was a programme called “Dancelines” where we took over Riverside Studios for six weeks with eleven dancers (four of whom choreographed as well) and Siobhan Davies and Ian Spink and a camera crew and offline edit suite for the entire period. The resulting programme (1 hour 15 mins) contained numerous small pieces, all of which were made ‘for and with camera’.

After the programme “Dancelines” we formed a company of the same name which went on to produce many dance and music films over the following decade, and I was involved in all those pieces either as producer or director.

Consequently, I also became involved in many independent commissions as both a director and on occasions director of photography, work that has continued on beyond Dancelines Productions to the present time.

Working with camera has always been an important part of my work and I find a close relationship between the creative process involved in lighting design and that of film making, both in the sense of ‘framing’ (an image) and that of editing. I have also very much enjoyed being able to cross over, from time to time, between the two mediums, the one very much stimulating and informing the other.

P.M.