10 Simple Tips to Making Dance on Camera

1) Dramatic lighting
(whether natural or man made) is crucial and a way to paint your performance space.

2) Contrast between foreground and background
gives a depth of field, adding a sense of mystery while enhancing the perception of speed and level changes. Make sure that your costume is not the same color as the background

3) Clarity of intention
 Shoot each section of the dance knowing what affect you want it to have on the viewer.

4) Idea/movement development
Respect the intelligence of your viewer by giving your essential idea three stages of development.

5) Focus
Edit the work with an intuitive sense of timing. Ask yourself – what is essential? Whatever is distracting (the heads of the audience, curtains, wings) or weak (wobbly performance or camera), or redundant, cut those moments out.

6) Dynamic range 
Choreograph the camera, as well as your subject so that the kinetic energy is palpable. Use the phrasing in the choreography to shape the video, while building  excitement and suspense.

7) Emotional balance
Use close-ups sparingly so that the intimacy feels like a gift;  let the wide-shots allow us to appreciate the design of the movement

8) Fresh Concept
While a dance for the stage can enthrall with strong technique, a dance video stands out when the idea behind the dance is fresh.

9) Wit
Find a way to make us inhale, smile or laugh.

10) Choreography that supports the idea!
Don't get so absorbed with the locations, the framing that you forget to dance.
Dance is still the heart of the film, so dance with heart and gusto!

Drawing inspiration from the rich history of dance films which have been made since the early 1900s.

The inventor Thomas Edison used dancers in his studio in New Jersey in the 1890s to test his equipment. Ever since, inventors have worked with dancers to demonstrate their newfound effects.

In the early 1900s, Georges Melies the French magician- turned photographer-turned filmmaker often incorporated dance in his brilliant shorts. In the vaudevillian style, Melies' structure had a clear beginning, middle, and end and his purpose was equally clear -to entertain you. The Russian puppeteer Alexander Shiraef, perhaps the first dancer-turned filmmaker, was playing in the same era with stop action photography, dissolves, and magic tricks with astonishing results. Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton had the double strength of being actor/director/writer/choreographers. Keaton thrilled you with his adventurous stunts while Chaplin appealed to your sense of pathos.After the technicians and magicians came the romantics.

The dancer-turned-director Stanley Donen who worked with Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire honored the Hollywood formula for commercial success while exploring various ideas from Fred's dancing on the ceiling to Gene's dancing with his altar ego in a display window (COVER GIRL).Scholar Larry Billman claims that a large portion of dance films have the underlying theme of "dancing to win." The script is driven by the appealing notion that dancing well can single you out from the crowd. These films instill a sense of hope. While not setting out with this intention, Daivd LaChapelle's film 2005 RIZE honors Krumping and a neighborhood's way of dealing with their struggle, of allowing that struggle to define who they are.

For a long stretch, a dance sequence in commercial films was synonymous with decoration, and sexual titillation. Yet sometimes, the tease is only a cover. Peal away the layers behind Busby Berkeley's extravaganzas with his cascading sets and sequined ladies and you’ll find a political message. Mussolini's films of synchronized swimmers have been compared to Berkeley's graphic spectaculars.Beyond the entertainment was a subliminal call for order and obedience to authority.The Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini honors the freedom of the individual, with a choreography of the streets that is joyfully chaotic.Maya Deren, daughter of a Russian psychiatrist who studied with Katherine Dunham in Haiti, is the one who moved beyond experimenting with machinery, plots, tricks and dance as decoration. Her shorts placed the body in landscapes in a magnetic way that few dance filmmakers have been able to top. Deren wanted to entrance her audience, to cast a spell upon them. She was fascinated by the voodoo culture of Haiti and a student of trance.

Over the last fifteen years, especially in Europe, dance video as a narrative form caught the producer's trust. But recently the narrative form seems to be fading with the emergence of the Revivalists. Around the world, filmmakers are creating something akin to mobile paintings, homage to landscape and bodies.

Within the history of dance on camera lies a long tradition of choreography created in the editing room. A recent example of this is NASCENT from the Czech born filmmaker Gina Czarnecki. NASCENT could be seen as graphic design, but it also plays on your powers of perception. Czarnecki writes, “I rework and re-work the images so that form and content are made in the process of constructing the imagery. It is laborious but gives a unique hand-made aesthetic- bringing in traditions of drawing and painting to the digital, time based medium.”

The vaudevillians made us laugh, the romantics to sigh, Maya Deren and the few hypnotists of her ilk to make us dream. The dancer turned filmmaker turned dancer Yvonne Rainer made us question the logic of any single movement whether of the body or the camera. She broke down our expectations. Meredith Monk and Sergei Parajanov instill us with a sense of wonder.

Action films, musicals, martial arts films have down to a science how to make the spine tingle with the movement in their films. With such amazing hits as HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS, which Owen Gleiberman from Entertainment Weekly called "an outrageously gorgeous spectacle of balletic aggression," what more inspiration could you need?