Mood board made in January, 2024.

Suki Schorer on Balanchine Technique, University of Florida; Illustrated Edition (March 22, 2006)

The film posters are intended to be encountered as an unconventional experience of learning classical ballet. Drawing from the “objective” gaze of early botany photography, the posters reimagine a typically still format—the learner’s manual and scientific illustrations—as a form closer to a performance than a didactic object. 

The video format at once captures and denies the somatic process of a living body. The subject’s subtle presence is seen in multiples, abstractions, and omissions. Codified ballet movements are present, but they are represented in a context that reflects the setup of the film studio and editing. Ballet technique emerges as a process entangled with transformed ways of seeing. Hence photography, and capturing real time and space for archival purposes. 

The posters present a paradox between “natural” and “polished”. Ballet is an aesthetic, and it is embodied. What if the dancer is costumed in a very polished way, with cracks showing through to highlight the tension between organic or real material and artifice/persona. 

Surrealism is referenced by the use of mid twentieth century American ballet aesthetics and Super 8 or 16mm film. Asynchronicity invites the viewer to assume a critical perspective: is the ballet dancer’s techniques authentic or fake? In or out of time? What would it require for him to move his technique in different directions, in the direction of masculinity or femininity for example? 

Pursuing this tension through film is an artistic strategy that attempts to make the tacit knowledge (and play with persona and the unknown) alive in the dancer's body a point of concern for the viewer. Can technique processes become explicit and transferable in this medium/presentation? Although the way the posters affect the viewer is yet to be known, they are designed to produce an emotional attitude for the viewer that simulates ways of approaching specialized knowledge as existing in the democratic realm of the possible and the plural. 

References/material/historicity: The posters’ 1960s aesthetic references celebrated innovators of photography and ballet, Eduard Murbridge and George Balanchine, respectively, and the dancer’s actual ballet practice, which evolved from his relationship with the late ballet instructor Janet Panetta. 

[Inspiration: Zac’s Freight Elevator by Dennis Cooper: https://www.kiddiepunk.com/zacsfreightelevator/]

[Research: The Afterlife of the Digital Image: https://www.girona.cat/sgdap/docs/21n47t0id240.pdf]

core Ideas:

Create a visual method that references scientific illustration, objective photography, and queer erotic art/pornography. Anatomical illustrations mixed with portraiture, which has a less direct form of communication based on complex expression of the subject.

“Illustrations simplify complex systems to help audiences understand scientific concepts”. Want to do this but in a queer language/mode of address.

Observation language:

Observation of the natural world (anatomy) and observation of the psychological world (persona).

Possible imagery and sound:

“Inter-titles” instruct the viewer?

Like a riddle, text combines with images to draw the viewer into the process of learning and decision making, also inspiring the viewer to move. 

Text made on top of the imagery appears like a stream of consciousness or poem, something like “dubbing” or “ventriloquizing” that feels like another layer. Maybe this is audio/music/sound instead, unclear.    

Questions:

If the Renaissance advanced illustrations of the natural world as “explorations” leading to a capitalist desire to conquer it (colonization), how can this history/pictorial system/technology be subverted by the subject appropriating it?

Staging for spectatorship:

What are we going to do with the film material itself?

What about projecting still images?

How can we combine analogue photography and analogue film in the posters themselves?

Archive the materials in a scrapbook, detailed chronology of the filming process?

Who is the target audience?

Artists and art researchers, dance students, educators and the general public?

What is the purpose of imitating scientific illustration, which has a requirement for accuracy and objectivity in its depiction of concepts?

“We do not yet know who is available to be addressed” —Thomas deFrantz, Doing Making Queer workshop