In 2010, a group of students and professors at The College of William & Mary created a splash when they turned the sterile blue of their college pool into the underworld of an ancient Greek myth.
The group took to the pool to shoot underwater publicity photos for William & Mary Theatre’s production of Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl. The play is “a contemporary re-examination of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, in which water plays a significant role as a passageway into the underworld and a way in which memory can be erased,” said Matthew Allar, an assistant professor of theatrical design.
The myth of Eurydice and Orpheus is an ancient Greek love story. A married couple in love, Orpheus is devastated following the unexpected death of Eurydice. The gods take pity on Orpheus and give him a chance to descend to the Underworld to retrieve her, provided he doesn’t look at her until reunited among the living.
With “an aquatic passageway as metaphor” as the hook, Allar, who enjoys scuba diving as a pastime, came up with the idea of an underwater shoot as a way to create compelling publicity images for the show. Despite a snowstorm the week of the shoot, Allar took his scuba gear and camera and met the cast of the play at the pool. Associate Professor Steve Holliday was also on hand to handle the lighting.
“Matt was a real champion. He spent something like four or five hours in scuba gear at the bottom of the pool,” said Francesca Chilcote, a theatre major. “The actors just dove right in and tried to make all the elements — water, lighting, hair, costumes — work for the photo. We were all bleary-eyed and chlorine-filled by the end, but what a great experience.”
Allar was very happy with the photos, and his idea proved inspired. The promotional photos were featured on the College of William & Mary’s website, in a YouTube video and in the local press, creating a buzz around campus that helped fill the auditorium for the show’s run.
“The underwater photo shoot, with facilities help from the kinesiology department, gave us a good way to promote the visual and thematic content of the show,” Allar said. “I feel very fortunate to have had the opportunity and creative cooperation from such talented students. Their collective ability to tell a story through movement, in this case underwater, makes the images so compelling.”
The compelling images were shot with surprisingly basic equipment. Allar used a Canon PowerShot SD400 (a 5-megapixel point-and-shoot) in the Canon housing, with no strobe light on-camera. Lighting was poolside via a pair of 500-watt tungsten theatrical lights with lighting gels by Roscolux.
It just goes to show, creativity resides in the eye of the shooter, not the brain of the camera, and there’s always a new way to tell a tale.
© Alert Diver — Q1 Winter 2011