Saturday. February 22. 1000 hrs.
Paige and I are at the Ganondagan site and the place is booming; an enormous turnout with people from several local schools and colleges coming together to witness exhibits of traditional games like dogsledding and Snow Snake. The crowds built up around the game demonstrations, so we did not have much of a good vantage. This changes when the live performances inside the visitor center unfold.
We made it to the first storytelling episode played out by Perry Ground a bit late, so we were hunkered down in the middle of the audience. It mattered little, as Mr. Ground is perhaps the most kinetic man I have ever captured on camera. Most speakers would stay relatively still on stage, pacing a bit occasionally, but Mr. Ground was gallivanting across the stage and into the audience, vibrantly playing out the Seneca creation story.
As soon as Mr. Ground was done with his performance, Bill Kraus and his family came out to demonstrate several traditional song and dance numbers. I was afraid the audio would be wrecked by the sounds of pounding drums and booming vocals, but the levels were solid and the quality was excellent.
Once the Kraus family was finished, we managed to get impromptu interviews with both Mr. Ground and Mr. Kraus, giving us some background on who they are and what they do. They were fairly brief interviews, lasting less than ten minutes each, but they provided a wealth of useful sound bites.
Following the interviews, Paige went about the visitor center, grabbing numerous snapshots of the museum of relics and mockups of the historic site with my Canon. She also got snapshots of the wampum, which I unfortunately could not find the time to capture with the JVC (the room was not much larger than a small kitchen and was packed with visitors). I’m starting to suffocate, so I hightailed back to the auditorium for the next performance.
While there I managed to set up my kit right at the cusp of the stage, front row next to another photographer’s setup. Prime seats. It was Perry Grounds next performance, where he played out the story about a turtle who managed to fly south for winter (long story, but thoroughly entertaining). Again, very mobile individual and was a real test of me balancing exposure and focus while on the move.
Sadly we could not stay any longer, as all of our memory cards were filled to capacity and the batteries are near drained. We didn’t have any computers on hand to transfer the footage over, so we did all that we could during the course of the day.
-IM
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