Standing in the wings at YBCA, Leica in hand, watching Alonzo King’s dancers move through Handel like light through water. When you’re backstage you’re seeing the machinery of transcendence. The sweat. The breath. The moments before and after the magic happens.
Brodovitch knew this. Those ballet photographs of his weren’t about perfection, they were about the blur between effort and grace, the space where bodies become something else entirely. He understood that the interesting stuff happens in the margins, in the wings, in the split-second before or after the moment everyone came to see.
LINES dancers, they’re not just executing steps. They’re translating Handel’s mathematical precision into human flesh and bone. And from where I’m standing, you see the cost of that translation. The strain. The beauty. The absolute commitment to something that exists for seconds and then disappears forever.
That’s what I’m hoping to capture. That moment when a dancer’s line becomes architecture, becomes music made visible.
I have seen so many lands vanish in my wake, torn down like stage sets. What survives of them? An image as fleeting as a dream: whatever beauties I discovered, I already knew by heart.