I’ve always been fascinated in photographing movement and dance. What intrigues me is how the spirit is somehow released to fly in movement – it’s like watching magic. When I take pictures that sense of magic is what I’m searching for, trying to catch the moment where the movement in the image touches our own sense of inner freedom – where we too can do anything, be anyone.
I‘d long had a vision of creating an exhibit on the street in Harlem, New York – featuring huge photographic canvases of Latin dance that would inspire people to feel the joy . Because of my own personal roots in the US and Cuba, and my passion for dance , I went to Cuba to create a series of exhibits featuring bold colourful images of Cuban dance – this project is called Liquid Heat and became a yearly immersive event with live music and a backdrop of a poetry soundtrack.
Cuban culture is embodied, with personal power strongly rooted in the body. My aim was to be somehow able to transmit that sense through my images – and I did it by creating walk through exhibits that recreated the experience of being in the middle of the dance, by inviting the public to become an active participant in their viewing. A music and rhythm summer camp for disadvantaged children gave them an embodied experience of the imges and another culture.
It was on one of my trips to New York, on my way to Heathrow airport, listening to the news on the radio that I heard yet one more report of knife stabbings that the idea came to me to work with cool urban movement forms that could reach ‘at risk’ young people and inspire them to skirt the violence and channel their energy into high-adrenaline, high skill movement practices…. And so Life on the Edge was born.
