LA Yoga. Feature. Feature. Moving Image and Asana

:: November/December 2004 Volume 3/Number 6

Moving Image & Asana:

By Bob Belinoff

It doesn’t take talking heads, a story line, a 35 mm Panaflex camera, craft services and a crew for the moving image to make a spiritual statement. Instructional yoga videos can help anyone uncover their own truth in their own time, while following the example of a master. There are probably as many instructional yoga videos available as there are master yoga instructors, and dozens of new training videos and DVDs come out every year.
Here are three different takes on the instructional yoga video and the teachers who are changing the way they are using the medium of the moving image.

SHIVA.
Shiva Rea’s latest video, Yoga Shakti (reviewed in LA YOGA July August 2004), takes advantage of the DVD format in ways we’ve never seen before. The chaptered DVD configured as a do it yourself matrix means that students can customize their own practice session. The video contains 41/2 hours of asana that can be put together with a kind of creative spontaneity that can make every practice a different kind of learning experience. “I encourage people to bring an exploratory spirit to their practice,” Shiva says. Yoga Shakti also goes considerably beyond the confines of a hardwood floor, taking us on a sweeping vista visit from the sandbars of the Cocoa Islands in the Maldives to the Ganges with stops in between for drummers, bejeweled elephants and temple courtyards.

This is using DVD technology to help students create a personalized exercise routine while they experience the sights, sounds and the very climate that produced the practice. It gives us an intimacy with India the place, and the very soul of the land and the sea, that produced the asana.

ERICH.
Erich Shiffmann takes us to the opposite extreme. Using his own fascination with the technology and the creative possibilities, Erich bought his own camera and editing software, learned to edit, became his own one man crew and often goes no further than his backdoor for his production locations. The result is Erich’s Backyard Series. It gives us a special kind of intimacy with the teacher. Erich confesses in the opening to this video that, “hey, it’s just me and you, there’s not even anyone running the camera, its on automatic.” The result is that the viewer feels like they are sitting in on Erich’s private personal practice, and yoga is “felt” as much as it is seen, as basic inner work available to anyone, anywhere.

Then there’s his Freedom Style Yoga DVD. Not really an instructional video, this is the Erich and Friend’s “basement tapes.” One remote control camera is all it takes. What we get is more than asana. Here Erich is actually redefining what most people think of as yoga. The video opens on an empty room. He begins to practice, others join him. There is quiet and meditation, there is laughter and music, there is experimentation, sharing, spontaneity, flow and an in-the-moment-go-with-it feeling that expands the meaning of yoga and breaks down the walls between teacher, student and fellow practitioner. This is landmark stuff, and deserves to be screened wall size wherever two or more gather - with or without a mat.

LOU.
Lou Volpano, a yoga student for 14 years, is a veteran show business consultant with special experience in distressed business “turn arounds.” Not long ago he put his entertainment career into turn around and put together a team of teachers and filmmakers to produce a yoga video television series. “I wanted to do what I knew was in my heart.” Volpano says. “Yoga gave me the confidence to sit still and do what I had to do.”

The result is a TV series called “Great Yoga Teachers.” It can be seen regularly on the Wisdom Channel, which is available to over 6 million subscribers nationwide, nearly 200,000 of them in the Los Angles area.
Everyone involved in the production - camera operators, editors, graphic artists, and grips, practice yoga. And everyone owns a piece of the production company and participates in the fruits of this labor of love.

Each episode of “Great Teachers” features four teachers demonstrating one posture in three levels, for beginners, intermediate and advanced practitioners. The series includes segments from LA based yoga teachers: Marne Semick , Kim Haegele, Stella Valente , Jill Miller, Matt Crowder , Rie Katagiri and Heather Onori.

The series enters its first season in the fall quarter of 2004, second season this year, and is going on-location to five studios around Southern California in November to fill the order for 13 more shows in 2005.

Bob Belinoff is a Los Angeles based documentary film-maker and can be reached at bob@digitalwkshop.com.