It’s a blindingly bright morning in Singapore. The glass panels of Marina Bay Sands hotel glisten in the sunlight and stretch high to the white skies above. A graceful ballerina stands by the waters on the forefront, and reaches one arm to the clouds, and another to the cement below, the grandeur of the Sands’ architecture reflecting in her body’s arch. Miles away, on the shores of Chennai’s beach, as the sea fusses and foams on the sands, a Bharatanatyam dancer strikes a pose, the hem of her heaved-up saree wet by the warm water. It is these unusual marriages of setting and dance that photographer Sam Kumar has striven for these last four years. And the fruits of his effort come together at ‘Environmental Dance’, an exhibition of 30 of his photographs now on show at Art Houz.
“I was always a Nature and landscape photographer, as well as a dance connoisseur. While I’ve usually photographed dancers at live stage performances, I wanted to bring my love for Nature and dance together, by taking the art form to the outdoors,” says Sam. In 2009, Sam was also exposed to a great deal of awareness campaigns on environmental degradation, particularly about deforestation and the destruction of valleys by large dams. “I wanted to do something about this, in my capacity as an artiste, and capturing the beauty of Nature, with the human element of dance within it, felt like a different way of expressing my love for the Earth.”
One of the earliest locations Sam shot at was in the beaches and forests of Bali with contemporary dancer and Reiki healer Amalia. He followed up with shoots across Singapore with ballerina Marianne Verhaagen, and Singaporean choreographer Beverly Yuen. In India, he took dancers to the banyan-shaded streets of Chennai, the beaches of Puducherry and Mamallapuram, to the quirky heritage homes of Fort Kochi, and along the paddy fields of Kumarakom in Kerala. Sam takes most pleasure in a series of pictures against the ancient walls of the Konark Sun temple in Odisha, with Japanese Bharatanatyam and Odissi dancer Mio Ikeda. “I chose dancers for this project only if they loved Nature and had a special interest in its conservation,” says Sam.
This reflects in the movements of dance that his images freeze. “I only had one rule for all the dancers: to not pose. They were to respond to the environment around them in dance, and I would capture those moments. We would shoot for a day or two, and I’d get about 50 or 60 photographs, with about 10 useable ones, where I felt the beauty of Nature most stood out.” Sam adds that the experience of shooting dancers outdoors gives the photographer a new role: that of a choreographer of sorts. In positioning dancers at various vantage points and in “designing the composition” of the shot, Sam found greater freedom than in shooting dancers on formal stages. From Art Houz, ‘Environmental Dance’ will now travel to Japan later this year, besides to Singapore and the U.S.
The exhibition is on till January 13, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
