For the next several days, Yale's Cross Campus will transform into a giant work of art after dark with the installation of David Michalek's "Slow Dancing."
Artist David Michalek is fascinated with dance and dancers. "I love dancers," he said. "I love who they are, and what they stand for. I really wanted to make a work that could also, among other things, celebrate dance in sort of a different medium."
That medium turned out to be video. Michalek started by contacting 43 dancers from around the world, representing a wide variety of dance genres. Dancers were told to compose a five-second dance piece.
Michalek filmed the dancers using a high-definition, high-speed camera that captured them at about 1,000 frames per second. He then stretched that five seconds into ten minutes of super slow-motion video.
"What it allows us to do is see the intelligence of the body," Michalek said. "You can watch the face; you can see the emotional shifts and changes that happen on the face of the artist; but you can also see [and] almost feel the intelligence through every limb and sinew."
For his video installation "Slow Dancing," the slow-motion video of the dancers randomly appears on a trio of 24-by-18-foot screens draped side by side. Michalek said the effect is mesmerizing. "People will say, gee, I just can't get enough of this," he said. "There is something addictive about it. It makes me feel like I took a nap; I feel like I did yoga. I feel like I saw my therapist. That's a powerful idea."
"Slow Dancing" runs through Tuesday, September 16, from 8:00 to 11:00 pm every night on Yale's Cross Campus.