Thousand-hand dance

Evening hot-spring dance performance, (called the Thousand-hand Dance, portraying the Buddhist Avalokatesvara) at the Brilliant Spa Resort, Yangzonghai (Yangzong Lake), near Kunming, Yunnan, China...Manfrotto.I’d never come across this before, and when I saw it one warm evening in Yunnan, east of the capital Kunming, I was enchanted. The dancers stand in line facing the audience and the arm and hand movements are co-ordinated exquisitely, fluttering out and around like a fan....or a halo. I was shooting a hot-spring resort for a local company, and this was the centerpiece of the evening entertainment (I have to admit that I was sitting in the hot pool at the time with a beer, which seemed the right way to enjoy any stage show)...I arranged to shoot the following evening, half an hour before the live performance. For various reasons, if you have the opportunity it’s much better to do theatrical shooting like this outside of live performances. Here, one reason was precision of lighting, and another speed. The stage lighting was good, but I thought I could improve on it - at least for my purposes. Although the lights were programmed, as is usual, and changed for different dances in the show, the lights physically did not move, and so there was something of a compromise. What I really wanted for this shot was a symmetrical arrangement between left and right, but favoring one side in brightness. I also wanted to kill the background for better contrast. As for speed, again I wanted precision - arms sharp but some slight motion blur in the fingers, which incidentally were accentuated by silver extensions. That motion blur was important because I needed to convey the sense of dance in an otherwise still image. Fortunately, there was plenty of time to meter, and work out the balance between ISO, depth of field and shutter speed. With a Nikon D3, an ISO of 500 was not going to give me any significant noise trouble, especially because the lit figures were full of sparkling detail (no large smooth mid-to-dark areas to show off noise), and it would give me ƒ13 for the all-important depth of field, and a shutter speed of 1/3 sec. I shot with a medium-telephoto: 110mm on a 70-200mm lens...The background to the dance is the real interest. While this is a modern production, glitteringly costumed, and the well-known Chinese choreographer Zhang Jigang seems to have appropriated the credit for the dance in China, it is in fact an ancient form, though I doubt somehow we’d have seen the bare midriff in the old days...Anyway, the references are Buddhist, and the dancers, who appear as a single, multi-armed figure, represent Guanyin, the Goddess of Compassion. The Chinese name, qian shou guan yin, means ‘the thousand hands of Guanyin’. And historically she comes from the Indian Bodhisattva of Compassion, Avalokitesvara. Not quite as simple as that, but close enough for this little tale, because some years earlier I traveled to the far northwest of Cambodia, to the still-ruined huge temple complex of Banteay Chhmar, the Citadel of the Cat. On its one-kilometer surrounding wall are, or rather were, carved eight bas-relief figures of this ancient Buddhist figure. I photographed them. A few months later most were hacked out and stolen in a scandalous operation, apparently involving elements of both the Cambodian and Thai military. Some were recovered, but you’re unlikely to see them restored in the way I saw them. But that’s another story altogether....