Jon Reyes x Mathieu Forget x Erick Hercules
What's up everyone! It's Mathieu and Erick from #WeLevitate and we are back! This season, we've been prepping a bunch of different projects for you guys.One of the things we've started exploring lately is the study of movement. Rather than just narrowing people down to being hip hop dancers, ballerinas, runners, basketball players, trickers etc., we thought it'd be interesting to mix styles together that all share the notion of movement as its own art form. This is why we reached out to Jon Reyes, one fo NYC's (and the world's) greatest scooter rider and see if he'd be interested in exploring this concept with us.Erick: My previous career as an opera singer has taught me to appreciate timing and storytelling. For this new project, we’ve challenged ourselves to showcase the beauty of movement for what it truly is. We are hardwired to put everything in categories, but as a challenge to ourselves, we’ve decided to mix these different fields, and in turn get a fresh set of faces, talents and stories mixed with our dance photography to show you guys that you can explore movement through photography as never seen before!Mathieu: As a former professional tennis player, I've always seen a lot of similarities between sport and dance. I believe that sport, at a high level, is a form of dance because of all the nuances you have to apply to the game. When I approached Erick with the idea of reaching out to uniquely talented athletes like Jon, he immediately love it and so we made it happen. Collaborating with Jon was very enriching because we played off each other moves to come up with interesting poses. I looked at his photos and videos before meeting him so I could have an idea of what to shoot but once there, we came up with new improvised positions that resulted in the amazing photos below!Jon had so much control and elegance in his movement that it was really easy to connect with. It also motivated to want to extend my moves and reach as far as I possibly could. This was my first time collaborating with a scooter rider and the experience was so inspiring that I now want to hit up more people like him... plus I made a new friend.[video width="1920" height="1080" mp4="https://thisiswod.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Shadow-in-the-City-Clean.mp4"][/video]I think we can all agree that one of the highlight was when our good friend Gavin Millette from LA randomly hit us up and decided to join us to shoot some video. Gavin was in town to shoot some project with Amex and Swizz Beatz and having him join us added a whole new layer to the project! The energy was contagious and this little project of ours almost turned into a full production shoot with outside people asking us if they could to take part in! Check out the quick snippet we put together in just 5 minutes ;)Follow us @welevitateFollow the insanely talented scooter rider at @JonreyesnycFollow the duo at @forgetmat & @erickherculesFollow the smooth filmmaker at @GavinMillette
