There’s something obscene about freezing a body mid-flight against all that falling water, obscene in the best way, the way that makes you understand why cameras were invented in the first place. Ive got these LINES Ballet dancers, people who’ve turned their spines into questions and their limbs into arguments, and I’ve set them against something that doesn’t give a shit about line or extension or any of the precious bullshit I pretend matters.
That waterfall was there before ballet, before photographs, before anyone decided the human form should be disciplined into something transcendent. And here I am, catching these two, Babatunji, Madeline, doing exactly what they’ve been trained to do, which is to make the impossible look like it’s the only reasonable response to gravity, to air, to being alive at all.
The thing is, it works. It shouldn’t, but it does. Because what I’m really documenting isn’t dance or nature or the collision of the two, it’s that moment when something rehearsed and artificial becomes realer than real. When all those hours in the studio, all that muscle memory and controlled breathing and pointed feet, when all of that dissolves into pure gesture.
Not performance. Necessity.
Reunion Island, Indian Ocean. Middle of nowhere, which is another way of saying middle of everywhere that matters.