Jumping off the Walls with Janusphere Dance Company

I’ve had the pleasure this week to be working on some new production material and flyer/postcards for Ajkun Ballet Theatre and Janusphere Dance Company. While the Ajkun images are not yet ready to share (stay tuned, these next ones I’m loving!), I thought I’d go through the process of how Darion Smith, director of Janusphere and I come up with the images for his marketing.

For this shoot we started the conversation about a month ago when Darion giving me an in-depth look at the ideas behind some of his new works. Usually one or two of the scenes he describes to me starts to set off images in my head, or several different ideas about how we can depict what he is talking about in 2D.

For one particular shot, Darion was talking about a individual who is in a dream dealing with all the ‘voices’ in his head: the different facets of himself, along with all the voices and comments from the people in his life that made an impression on him. The night before I met with Darion, I was watching one of the Matrix movies on TV, the second one I think, where Neo is in the room with the man dressed in white, the architect. The wall of TVs behind him show at times different scenes and then different versions of what Neo is thinking… and thus I knew what I wanted to do!

We actually shot all the material for this in a very short time and had so much fun doing it! We had the dancers give me as many different faces as they could as I shot them at different angles. Next we had Milan, the featured artist, think about how he would react if he just couldn’t take it anymore and needed to get outside of his head/skin/body.

From there I spent some time in my favourite computer program working on the ‘wall of faces,’ which once compiled was easy to distort so that we had a curve that looked like a wall. Add in the flooring and Milan and voila!

As Janusphere is currently re-vamping its website entirely, we spent the rest of the time working on shots to fill that new working space. Again stay tuned, I’ll let you know when that is up and going!