Blog 10 – Documentary

I’ve actually made several documentaries recording live performances of theater, dance and music productions. Most of these have been for fairly straightforward historical documentation – so that there is a record of the live performance that can be referenced later. The purpose of these basic documentations has been as a reference for recreating the work in the future and for presenting to funding organizations and producers. The emphasis has been on making it as “pure” as possible, with a minimal impact from the videographer, usually from a wide, establishing shot from the center rear of the audience or a similar vantage point.
While that had been the conventional wisdom of how to approach shooting for live performance documentation, particularly in the early days of video in the ‘80s and ‘90s, as cameras and equipment have become smaller, higher quality, and more affordable, and with the advent of ‘desktop video editing’, the approach has changed fairly dramatically. Those of us who have been somewhat schooled in shooting video and film have long advocated for a more ‘cinematic’ approach to documenting performance. In order to try and capture the experience of the audience at the performance, it’s important to create and edit shots of various framings and angles. While the straight, wide-angle, ‘documentation’ shot from the back of the house will record most of the movement and the stage picture as a whole, it fails to capture the experience of it. It’s a classic case of “reality”, in the form of what is essentially a surveillance camera recording what is happening in the room, not accurately translating the perceived reality of the experience of an audience with a selective eye. So in moving to an edited and composed documentary of the performance and away from an “objective” single camera shoot, we encounter questions of intent and interpretation.
Each performance has a unique character to it. Each work has a different intent. The atmosphere and audience experience that a performing artist seeks to create should be the paramount goal in the performance documentary filmmakers mind. That is of course, if the documentary maker is seeking to represent the artistic vision of the performance. If the goal is to comment on the social and cultural event, then a different approach becomes necessary. The documentarian must strive to place the performance in a context, for the audience, for the performers and creators, and for the society and culture surrounding it.
In a theatrical performance documentary of this type one would most likely start with the creators of the work: Director, Writer, Designer, Choreographer, Composer, etc., filming at work, interviewing them during the process of pre-production, production and performance. The views and opinions of others involved in the process is also crucial to the understanding of the experience: Producers and others with a financial stake in what is created, publicists and those directly involved with the public perception of the performance, and of course the performers and other artists involved in actually bringing the work to life on stage.
Other interview subjects are of course audience members, people who see the work at all stages: those brought in for a preview at various points in the development as well as the final audience for the performance itself, interviews both before and after the experience.
If the performance has greater social or political consequences, the context for those should be explored. For instance; if the play concerns the experience of dealing with autistic children, then an appropriate series of interviewees may include health and social workers, public policy makers, parents and children with autism.