Film: Life Story

You’re about to see a ballerina dancing a solo on her 80th birthday.

Kalliopi Venieri was an international dancer with some of the world’s leading companies, such as American Ballet Theater, the Marquis de Cuevas company and Dutch National Ballet. George Balanchine personally coached her in Hamburg. Later on, she opened a ballet school in Athens - she’s Greek - and that's where I met her. Eventually she retired from the school and took to sculpture - making sculptures of the dance, of course. I found myself taking photos of them and we were lucky enough to be invited to put on several exhibitions in the major galleries of Greece. While we were preparing for one at the Archeological Museum of Delphi, it occurred to me that Kalliopi's 80th birthday was on the horizon. 

So I asked her: “How are you going to celebrate?”
“I’m not sure, have you any ideas?” 
“Yes, I do. You’re going to dance, and I’m going to make a film of you dancing”

So I went off and did a one-day course in film-making, and learned a few more tricks in other courses. Meanwhile she went into training again - she’d not danced for over 10 years - and chose a solo she’d created for one of her pupils. It’s set to the Andante of Mozart’s Piano Concerto 21 - well-known as the Elvira Madigan theme, though the film is pretty well forgotten.  We listened to several recordings (there are hundreds), but Géza Anda’s was the clear winner. 

Says Kalliopi: ”The piece is emotionally penetrating; some interpretations make too much of that. Anda keeps to a fitting reserve. This was the version I used back in 1981 and I still have the vinyl on my shelf."

We hired the Aliki Goussa Dance Studio in Athens for 5 days, and I brought in a couple of Edinburgh friends, Adam Knight and Glen Rutter, both professional film-makers, to help me (Adam happens also to be the WebMaster for the Edinburgh Music Review). Most of the footage of the first four days ended up on the cutting room floor. To capture in the camera the complex dynamics of the dance proved remarkably tricky; very different from my work in still photography and theirs in interviews and documentary. So what you’ll see is mostly what we shot on our 5th day - Kalliopi’s 80th birthday!