SU dance groups promote performances on social media
Courtesy of Zain Elwakil
Both Creations Dance Company and Outlaws Dance Troupe have used Instagram videos to showcase their performances.
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During a normal semester, Syracuse University junior Katie Nehring would be performing onstage with Creations Dance Company and Outlaws Dance Troupe, two on-campus dance organizations. Instead, she’s dancing in their videos on social media and filming them too.
Creations and Outlaws have turned to Instagram to showcase their work during the coronavirus pandemic. Nehring is a featured dancer in two recent videos –– one from Creations and one from Outlaws. She also shot Creations’ latest piece on an iPhone.
Outlaws Dance Troupe filmed a concept video featuring a dance to “Wetty” by Fivio Foreign in the parking garage of the Theory Syracuse apartment building. Courtesy of Zain Elwakil
“It’s my first time really filming something like this. So I was just coming from some things I’ve watched before and trying to replicate that,” Nehring said. “I’m happy with what we got out of it. It came out pretty well.”
Asajahnique Collins, the coordinator of Creations, choreographed the piece. She initially came up with the dance over the summer and wasn’t sure when the team would be able to use it. But after dancing in Creations’ first concept video, which was filmed on the Quad, Collins realized her piece would work on video too.
When you record, you have to dance probably like two or three times harder, just to have the same energy as if you were on stage.Omolara Akinfemiwa, co-chair of Outlaws.
Nehring filmed the video in the Women’s Building, in the studio that Creations uses for rehearsals. In the video, all the dancers are masked, and Collins said the group had to shoot quickly because they only had the space for a few hours.
Collins normally spends several weeks choreographing and “cleaning” a single dance before performing it in front of an audience. And because the camera is so much closer than an audience would normally be, Collins was especially conscious of the technique of the dance.
“I thought about it (and) it’s like, well, people can rewind this and look at each individual person,” Collins said. “It’s not like when you’re onstage (where) you kind of look at the entire stage. So it was a lot more pressure, but I think the dancers did a phenomenal job of working under that pressure, especially with the time constraints.”
It’s a sentiment shared by Omolara Akinfemiwa, co-chair of Outlaws and choreographer of its most recent video, a dance set to the song “Wetty” by Fivio Foreign. Specific dance moves look different depending on the camera angle, so she remained conscious of that while rehearsing the piece, Akinfemiwa said.
Dancers must work even harder during recorded dances to maintain the same energy they would have if they were performing on stage. Courtesy of Zain Elwakil
She told her dancers that it was important to maintain a performance level energy, even when they were doing multiple takes.
“When you record, you have to dance probably like two or three times harder, just to have the same energy as if you were onstage,” Akinfemiwa said.
Akinfemiwa collaborated closely with videographer Zain Elwakil, who used a camera and filmed the dance in the parking garage of the Theory Syracuse apartment building. Elwakil had experience shooting music related videos before for hip-hop artists and DJs, but this was his first experience with a dance group.
As a content creator, Elwakil specializes in helping creatives tell their stories. He also will be mentoring Nehring so she can learn more about the filmmaking process.
“One thing that I think (Outlaws and I) have come to realize together, is that when you pair good quality content with incredible talent, it’s almost like an accidental form of performance,” Elwakil said. “Obviously, this video doesn’t have the limit of a seating capacity. It really goes as big as Instagram can make it go.”
The video is getting a lot of positive responses from viewers and has been shared around 200 times on Facebook, Akinfemiwa said. She and Elwakil are working on more videos and plan to release them soon.
Creations is also working on new material and hopes to release a video over winter break, Collins said. A lot of dance groups on the West Coast have been using video to share their work, Elwakil said, but he hadn’t seen the same on the East Coast. He thinks that COVID-19 has given groups an opportunity to take advantage of this technology.
“Now that the pandemic has hit, it’s definitely challenging creatives of all sorts, myself included, to kind of reevaluate how we communicate with our audience, and there’s an element of entrepreneurship in that,” Elwakil said. “So in that sense, I definitely feel a sense of responsibility and drive towards helping them tell that story.”
Published on November 9, 2020 at 9:25 pm
