The first time I tried to put a live dance performance on the internet, I failed. Miserably.
In the room, the performance was breathtaking—a subtle, intimate piece filled with tiny gestures, shared glances, and the audible sound of breath and skin on the floor. It was the kind of art that makes the air in a room feel thick.
On the livestream? It looked like ants crawling on a piece of wood. The energy, the intimacy, the very soul of the piece had vanished, lost somewhere in the cold, unblinking eye of the camera. I had perfectly documented the performance, but I had utterly failed to translate it.
That failure taught me the most important lesson of my career in hybrid art: a camera is not a window; it's a translator. And it lies. It flattens space, ignores energy, and misses the subtleties that make a live performance feel alive. Your job isn't to capture reality. Your job is to create a new reality, one that is native to the screen.
Lesson 1: The Camera is a Dancer, Not an Audience Member
My first mistake was thinking the camera's job was to be the "best seat in the house." I put it on a tripod in the center and let it run. The result was static, distant, and boring.
Here's the thing: in a live theater, your eye is the camera. You can choose to look at the wide shot, then zoom in on a single dancer's hand, then pan across to see a reaction. A single, static camera removes that agency.
The breakthrough came when we started choreographing the cameras themselves. We treated our camera operators as dancers. They had their own blocking, their own movement scores, their own relationship with the performers on stage.
- We used a Steadicam that weaved through the dancers, creating a sense of immersion that no audience member could ever get.
- We used intimate close-ups on faces and hands, revealing emotional details that would be lost in a theater.
- We cut between a wide "objective" view and a tight "subjective" view to play with perspective.
The camera stopped being a passive observer and became an active participant in the story. It had a point of view.
Lesson 2: Your Ears are More Important Than Your Eyes
In a live performance, you don't just hear the music. You feel it. You feel the percussive thud of a footstep through the floor. You hear the collective intake of breath from the audience. You sense the acoustic space of the room. A single microphone doesn't capture this.
Bad audio will make a beautiful video feel cheap and amateurish. Good audio can make a simple video feel immersive and visceral.
I learned this while filming a flamenco performance. In the room, the power came from the zapateado—the footwork that was as much a percussive instrument as it was a dance. On the first recording, it sounded like someone tapping on a cardboard box.
Here’s how we fixed it. We created a layered soundscape:
- The Music: A clean feed directly from the soundboard.
- The Room: Ambient microphones to capture the natural reverb and feel of the space.
- The Details: Tiny microphones placed on the floor to capture the raw, percussive impact of the footwork, and lavalier mics on the dancers to pick up the sound of their breath.
We mixed these layers together in post-production, creating a soundscape that was more real than reality. We didn't just capture the sound; we translated the feeling of the sound.
Lesson 3: Light for the Robot, Not the Human
Your eyes are miracles of biological engineering, with an incredible dynamic range. They can see detail in the bright spotlight and the deep shadows simultaneously. A camera sensor is a dumb robot. It can't.
Stage lighting is designed for the human eye and often looks terrible on camera. Deep, dramatic shadows become muddy, noisy black holes. Bright highlights blow out into formless white blobs.
The solution is to light for the camera first. This often means creating a "flatter" look for the live audience. You have to increase your base light levels and reduce the contrast between the brightest and darkest parts of the stage. You are no longer lighting a three-dimensional space; you are painting a two-dimensional image for the camera to capture. It's a different art form.
Lesson 4: You Are Not a Documentarian; You Are a Filmmaker
This is the biggest mental shift. You are not creating a historical record of a performance. You are creating a new piece of art that is inspired by the original.
This frees you to use the language of cinema.
- Edit aggressively. A 60-minute stage piece might become a 10-minute film. The pacing of a live show is completely different from the pacing of a screen-based experience.
- Add what isn't there. We've added visual effects, voice-overs, and even scenes filmed in entirely different locations to create a piece that was more emotionally true to the original than a simple recording could ever be.
- Embrace interactivity. A livestream isn't a one-way broadcast. We've built systems that let the online audience control lighting cues, vote on choreographic paths, or have their comments appear as part of the visual projection. It's not the same as being in the room, but it creates a new kind of presence, a new form of "liveness."
Stop trying to bottle lightning. You can't. The magic of live performance is its ephemeral nature. Instead, use the lightning strike of the live event as the spark to create a new fire—one that can burn on a screen, travel across the world, and last forever.