Same Old Songs, Brand New Dancers
By Daniel Leaderman 10/8/09
The University of Maryland will host this year’s DC Dancesport Inferno amateur ballroom dance competition in early November. Along with events for advanced and experienced dancers, there will be special competitions for newcomers – people who have just begun to dance and have little or no experience competing.
I want to interview some of these beginners before and after they compete and take pictures while they are dancing. Lately, TV shows like “Dancing With the Stars” and “So You Think You Can Dance” have drawn a large audience, so I’d like to do a story about people who think they can dance or, better yet, people who don’t really think they can dance but have decided to give it a try anyway. I believe there could be a compelling story here about people who take risks and try something new and scary.
The newcomer competition will be held on November 7 at the Stamp Student Union. The competition is open to spectators so there should be no problems getting pictures, audio, or video. I expect that once I gather my pictures and raw audio it will take only a few days to produce the project using Soundslides.
I haven’t been able to find any news coverage of this event in the past, and while there are a couple of photo galleries from past years online, I haven’t found anything that tells the kind of story about the competition that I would like to tell.
The story could certainly lend itself to a print story, but I don’t feel that one is required.
Dan,
ReplyDeleteThis does have promising visuals, and your focus should work. I wonder, though, if it will be as easy as you think to get good shots of the dancers while they're competing. Would you be able to wander around with a camera or video and get some close shots and detail shots instead of just a bunch of far-away crowded dance floor images? Maybe contact the organizers now and see how open they are to letting you document the competition -- as you say it may be no problem.
The other challenge of this is if anything went wrong you'd be out of luck. Maybe start to think of a back-up in case this doesn't work.
-Jeff