FLOODESIGN

exactly. In a later entrance, his jumps grow larger, and the camera opens up, still perfectly tracking the rhythm of his side-to-side motions. When Farrell appears upstage right, the same camera operator picks up her next sequence, mirroring her circular path on pointe. She is not always centered in the middle of the picture; instead, she appears to push the edges along as she travels. Her dancing leads the frame. On that same program — "Choreography by Balanchine: Part 3" — the same camera operators film Baryshnikov in "Prodigal Son." Baryshnikov is at his most muscular and impetuous, and thus their camera work changes in response to his qualities. As he flies down the diagonal, so does the frame, picking up his energy. At the height of one jump, Baryshnikov's fingers touch the top of the screen. One senses the camera operator, on the edge of his toes, zooming out as far as he could go. We never get to see the people behind the cameras. And yet everything we see is through their eyes, the human eyes that frame the dance with sensitivity and skill. "They're like gunslingers, and marksmen, or precision engineers," Matthew Diamond exclaims. A former dancer turned Academy Award-nominated director, Diamond took over directing "Dance in America" in the 1980s and inherited the camera operators who had joined the series a decade earlier. A number of them continued with him through "Dancemaker," Diamond's 1998 Academy Award- nominated documentary on Paul Taylor. "All I really do is talk to people," Diamond says of the director's role. "And I make a billion decisions. But it's kind of like the general says to the soldiers: go out there and fight. Well, it depends which soldiers you have." By 1978, Brockway had formed a team of three cameramen that would continue with "Dance in America" for decades: Ed Fussell, Don Lewis and Ronnie Smith, three guys from Tennessee who possessed the right mix of aesthetic sensibility and nerve to film the best dancers in the world. All three had started in their hometown of Chattanooga, where they had worked for WTVC, a local television station. There, they trained their eyes and wits doing local news, kids shows, award shows and other small-town fare, 90% of which was filmed live, using only two cameras. One by one, they moved up to the larger station in Nashville, where they were tapped for "Dance in America," which had just begun to rent out Opryland for its studio shoots. Dance history came to them: "It's funny for me to think that a guy who was born in Chattanooga and has lived in Tennessee all his life could speak with some authority on dance," Fussell observes wryly, after explaining to me in detail his thoughts on Tharp, Cunningham and Balanchine choreography, all of which he has filmed. We tend to think of artists such as Balanchine and Graham working in the Northeastern United States and along a network between Europe and the United States. But the "Dance in America" sessions that occurred in Nashville, with New York companies flown in and a local camera crew, suggest a little-told cultural encounter. The Balanchine the cameramen describe is technologically curious, respectful of their craft and wholly involved in the process of filming. To be sure, there was a chain of command: the director laid out the camera shots in dialogue with the choreographer. An associate director then rehearsed the camera operators through the script of camera tasks before the taping. But this did not stop Balanchine from coming down from the control room and onto the floor to peer through their viewfinders or in the monitors, to see how they had framed his choreography. "Too leetle!" he complained more than once in his heavily accented English, pinching the dancers' heads and feet between his fingers inside the frame: Russian for, "zoom in!" The constraints they faced had to do with period technology: Balanchine had to adapt his choreography to fit the 4 x 3 ratio of 1970s television screens. In the triangular effect of the 4 x 3 ratio, dancers in the foreground fare better than dancers in the background, who get compressed into ants. One solution Brockway deployed early on was a camera on a crane, handled frequently by Lewis, which allowed sweeping wide shots of the stage. Watching Lewis ride around in the crane camera, Balanchine "thought it looked like fun," Smith recalls. "So we put him in it, strapped him down and gave him a ride. We did Martha Graham the same way." (Yet another untold story of dance history.) Their stories offer a different slant on familiar figures. Balanchine "would sit and talk about whatever you wanted to talk about," Smith says. When Smith's back went out, Balanchine asked one of his dancers to teach him strengthening exercises. Graham was intense; Taylor loved to hang out. They nicknamed Martins "The Great Dane." In his first take for "Prodigal Son," Baryshnikov jumped clean out of their frames. Shooting ballet was more stressful than filming modern dance, but also felt more glamorous. "You could spot a Balanchine dancer. All these long-legged women come walking in," remembers Fussell fondly. Other camera operators from New York City later joined "Dance in America," including Juan Barrera, a Cuban refugee who fled the increasingly militarized country in the mid-1960s, and Hurwitz, who 8 | PEAKPERFS.ORG "IT'S FUNNY FOR ME TO THINK THAT A GUY WHO WAS BORN IN CHATTANOOGA AND HAS LIVED IN TENNESSEE ALL HIS LIFE COULD SPEAK WITH SOME AUTHORITY ON DANCE," FUSSELL OBSERVES WRYLY, AFTER EXPLAINING TO ME IN DETAIL HIS THOUGHTS ON THARP, CUNNINGHAM AND BALANCHINE CHOREOGRAPHY, ALL OF WHICH HE HAS FILMED.

• Cover