Creative Videographer Project: Stunning Choreography film test with Peter Groom
As a creative videographer, I’m often drawn to projects that blur the boundary between movement, performance, and place.
This choreography film test with Peter Groom was an intuitive and fast-moving exploration of dance and image-making in the Northumberland landscape. Shot and edited over just two days, it brings together the powerful physical presence of dancer Léa Tirabasso with fragmentary scenes featuring Peter and another performer—two figures whose relationship seems to shift between intimacy and estrangement.
Léa, wearing feathered angel wings, moves through fields, hills and a sandy beach, her presence at once striking and otherworldly. There’s no obvious destination—her journey feels internal as much as physical. She might be lost. Or searching. Or haunted by a sense of purpose just beyond reach. These sequences are intercut with more intimate and surreal moments featuring Peter Groom and a second dancer. Their scenes take place in a field and on a golf course, echoing rituals of care, repetition, avoidance, and tenderness. Together, these threads suggest connection and distance, memory and movement.
There’s a tone to this piece that occasionally evokes the spirit of Pina Bausch—the way the performers inhabit emotion through gesture, the way the choreography becomes porous to the environment. The characters often interact with their surroundings, yet remain emotionally sealed within their own worlds. Even when they’re outdoors, there’s a sense of interiority. A kind of beautiful dislocation.
Pina Bausch has long been an influence on how I approach movement and framing as a creative videographer. Her collaboration with Wim Wenders in the film Pina (2011) left a lasting impression on me—not only for its stunning use of dance, but for the way it places performers within striking natural and urban environments. The contrast between the fragility of the human body and the scale or texture of the landscape creates a powerful visual and emotional tension. That film helped shape my own sensibility, particularly my interest in filming dancers in wide, open, or surprising locations.
There’s something deeply cinematic about watching a solo performer move through an empty field, a city street, or an industrial ruin—something that speaks to isolation, resilience, and beauty all at once. In this choreography film test with Peter Groom, I tried to echo that instinct: letting the landscape become more than just a backdrop, allowing it to inform and shape the movement, and using the camera to draw out that layered relationship. As a creative videographer, those are the moments I find most satisfying—where image, movement, and place become inseparable.
For me, this was less about telling a clear narrative and more about capturing feeling through camera movement, performance, and pace. It was a chance to work responsively—to let landscape, light, and improvisation shape the film. Being a creative videographer on this project meant embracing spontaneity, holding ambiguity, and finding rhythm in the edit.
I wasn’t following a script, but rather tuning into subtle cues: a shift in wind, a flicker of eye contact, the unexpected shape a dancer’s body might make against a hillside. It was about noticing those transient, expressive moments and allowing them to lead. In many ways, editing this piece felt like composing music—balancing contrast, silence, repetition, and flow. Sometimes a single glance or gesture held more emotional weight than anything spoken.
It’s that kind of quiet intensity I aim to reveal when filming movement and dance, especially in open, unpredictable environments. Projects like this remind me how much of filmmaking is about listening—to the performers, the space, and the unfolding moment. That sensitivity is at the heart of what I strive for as a creative videographer.
If you’d like to watch more of my work exploring community stories, creative resilience, and diverse subjects across arts, heritage, and the environment, you can explore all my films here: https://alanfentiman.co.uk/films-by-alan-fentiman/
You can also find more of my films about artists and creative collaborations here: https://alanfentiman.co.uk/vimeo-videos/artist-films/