A couple Saturdays ago, I shot a tap dance reheasal. A difficult shoot, but a lot of fun.

The North Carolina Youth Tap Ensemble (NCYTE) is putting on a show, Good Vibrations, this weekend in Durham.

The globe-trotting North Carolina Youth Tap Ensemble will strut their stuff for local audiences at their annual shows at the Carolina Theater—located at 309 West Morgan Street in Durham—on Saturday, April 25th at 7 p.m. and Sunday, April 26th at 2 p.m.
The shows, entitled “Good Vibrations”, will feature the company members performing their varied repertory, accompanied by live music. In addition, NCYTE alumna Michelle Dorrance will take a break from performing in the national tour of STOMP to dance in the show. Derick K. Grant, a nationally renowned tap dancer who was an original member of the cast of “Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk,” will also perform. Contact the Carolina Theatre Box Office (919) 560-3030 or the Chapel Hill Ballet School (919) 942-1339 and get your tickets now before they’re sold out!

The newspaper will run a story on the show in Sunday’s paper. To run a photo with the sotry meant sending me to their rehearsal. Cool stuff!

The dancers were giving it their all, so there was lots of fun music and dancing to wathch. The shooting was not so easy. The room was large, but tight for the amount of dancers. They faced the interior wall, putting large, bright, cloud-lit windows behind and just above the dancers heads. Ths walls offered distracting backgrounds and my lenses don’t let me get the lens wide open enough to blur backgrounds in small spaces.

I lit with my on Vivitar off-camera, triggered optically by my on-camera sb-400 or with the wireless trigger. Without a second off-camera flash or mre ingenuity, the light was mainly shot off the ceiling to even and augment the ambient from the windows.

As a regular rehearsal, not a dress rehearsal, I did not even have the luxury of cool costumes.

I mixed it up as best I could.

I will have more photos and a report on the show next week! If you are in the neighborhood, I hope to see you at the show.

Tags: assignment, CHN, dance, ncyte, tap

This entry was posted on April 20, 2009 at 10:27 pm and is filed under tim's photos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.