POETRY OF MOTION

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIII, Issue 20639, 30 January 1937, Page 14

POETRY OF MOTION

CONCEPTION OF NEW DANCES THOMAS BOUCHARD’S WAY A scrap of paper in Bryant Park, New York, thrust by the wind, gently stirs and undulates on the ground, is slowly lifted into strange parabolas, spirals to rest in another spot or whirls and soars away. To Thomas Bouchard, watching from his studio window, it is the pure essence of dance. Mr Bouchard’s specialty is capturing the poetry of motion on the wing. Fugitive moments the minutiae of movement—are ensnared in his camera and held in the finished photograph, a visualisation of the elusive and the intangible bound to perpetual life. With this high susceptibility to flashes of action, sudden as "the turn of an eyeball,” “the swiftness and balance of a flsh,” he quotes Walt Whitman at you), it is natural that Mr Bouchard should be drawn to the dance. And felicitous has been his achievement in this field. He worked throughout the session last summer at the Bennington School of the Dance—a huntsman of mobility. His method is to stalk classes, stalk rehearsals, find his mark and shoot—sometimes after deliberation, at performances, sometimes, having chosen his sequences, at a special repetition of them. Thus he has made a record of the school’s classwork and productions of 1936. Mounted on a tall ladder, careless of any hazard, I saw him at 1.30 of the morning following the final presentations of the Workshop Group under Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman —"With My Red Fires” and “Quest”— absorbed in catching the fleeting flame of these great works. Mr Bouchard is a valuable asset to the modern dance, reflectively reporting its progress, preserving a record of its attainments, in photographs that hold the quick of modem movement. In the past five years, he has made pictures of Martha Graham’s, Doris Humphrey’s and Charles Weidman’s work, as well as of minor dancers, retelling the tale of their development in the terse terms of a new art.

The face proclaims the artist—a sensitive, modelled face, deep-eyed with the quest of beauty. Of French lineage and background, he speaks English with a slight accent that together with the remoteness and darting agility of his thought keeps you on the qui vive in conversation. He deplores the banality of the average motion picture. The true motion picture, or picture of motion, he believes, has been discovered but not fully realised. The larger field for him will be the making of these pictures of motion in films, carrying on his idea of pictures of motion in stills. An experimental sound short of John Bovingdon’s “Underground Printer” Is his first essay in this department. He would like to take modem ballets in their entirety—ballets which could be presented as screen art forms to-day and referred to as dance history tomorrow.

This is the great need of the modem dance, to be kept alive in the modem motion picture—transclence converted into permanence, as the transitory is made permanent in painting and sculpture. Mr Bouchard grew up in France; spent his youth studying painting in Paris, in the company of Tontine and other painters then little known. He is an artist and a poet in pursuit of evanescence, who has transferred his medium to the photography of action as a vital modem form.