Corps De Ballet I
ABOUT
Beyond sculpting the form along with the dancer into what ultimately becomes an image, what guides this body of work is a series of — rules. Those rules constitute the Score of how this work of visual choreography was created. If you look carefully across several images, sometimes a rule will snap into view. The rules aren’t important for the viewer to know. But they do impact the felt order of the project — especially when multiple images are presented simultaneously.
I call this body of work “Corps de Ballet” for several reasons. First, it is quite literally about the bodies of ballet dancers and about how those bodies are so profoundly shaped by the dictates and requirements of an unusually difficult dance form (one that often requires extremely early exposure to master it). Secondly, Corps de Ballet also refers to a group of dancers in a ballet company that are not soloists, but rather, perform as a group (such as the Flowers in the “Waltz of the Flowers” from The Nutcracker, for example). All ballet dancers are at one time or another, a part of this group. And some dancers never leave it. But there is a nobility to dancing in the Corps de Ballet and everyone knows it because it represents the most democratic part of the form.
The images in Corps de Ballet I / Series One (shown here) are printed as full frame positives with the 8x10 carrier lines visible around the periphery of the image and framed in a gray.