In Dreams
ErinTyner
Legendary Hollywood musical choreographer and director Busby Berkeley started out conducting large military parades and staging camp shows to entertain soldiers far from home during WWI. When he returned to the U.S., he worked his way through a string of small acting and assistant directing jobs to become one of the most famous—and innovative—dance directors ever to work in the movies. He was known for creating dance scenes with lavish, elaborate costumes, huge numbers of showgirls, surreal and fantastic settings, and kaleidoscopic aerial shots of his dancers’ bodies forming shifting geometric patterns.
In 1999, more than twenty years after Busby’s death, The Magnetic Fields wrote a song inspired by his visually arresting, jewel-colored dances; nine years later, Erin made this photograph inspired by that song, and one month after that, I discovered Erin’s photograph, learned all about Busby Berkeley, and had the pleasantly dizzying experience of imagining myself diving through the air, never to land.
How long an interval will there be between your looking at this image and being transported into a Busby Berkeley dream of your own?
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, meerasethi and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
