With the unique artform of the Dancescape, Narinder Dogra brings to our awareness the ongoing dance of the land - the primal, eternal motion present in drifting continents, in sliding glaciers, in shifting dunes. Against a backdrop of desert sands or eroding rock formations, his film records the brief moment of a dancer's whirling step. Rhythm and flow resonate both in the choreographic lines of the ballerina and in the earth's layers of sedimentary deposits.

Since the Big Bang explosion, the forces of nature have propelled the endless shifting of soil and rock. I envision the earth as an aged, slow-motion dancer. She twirls, drifts, wobbles on her axis, heaves up and down, ebbs and flows, circling in her eternal cosmic dance.

Narinder's ballet dancers dramatize the serpentine grooves of a canyon's contours. In return, the majesty and monumentality of the American wilderness accentuate the ballerina's fragility, their fleeting beauty. Together, the rhythmic and the still, the ephemeral and enduring, the fragile and unyielding- all intersect in Narinder Dogra's work, struck here and there by a glow of sunlight as if to remind us that the Dancescape is viewed primarily within our mind's eye.

My images may appear static, as if frozen in time- but look again, and you may envision the swirling dance of the spheres. In 1/250th of a second, the camera captures a sense of the rhythms set in motion 200 million years ago, before dinosaurs, not dancers, walked these lands.

Born in India, Narinder worked as an engineer. He later lived in Australia where he frequently photographed that continent's vast landscapes. In 1978, he settled in America, where the geology of the Southwest together with the availability of highly trained dancers, made an irresistible combination for his art.

I make these visual representations spontaneously, without planning. I just go along with the flow. Yet somehow, after the photography is done, each Dancescape brings to mind a different story from my Hindu upbringing, in effect creating its own title. Dancescapes are my tribute to Bharat Muni, a sage who wrote the treatise of dance 'Nataya Shastra' two thousand years ago.

The United Nations has exhibited Narinder Dogra's work in Rio de Janeiro, New York, Paris and Atlanta in a juried show "Focus on Environment." More recently, his work was shown at the Sedona Art Center and in California shows at the Long Beach Arts Gallery, the Spectrum Gallery, and the Sebastopol Center for the Arts.

If you would like to see more images by Narinder Dogra, on the web, be sure to visit www.voiceofdance.org.