"Fleeting Perspectives: A Paper Ballet" Part 1

With the New Year, came New Ideas, resulting in  New Work! This year I decided to incorporate dance into my newest work "Fleeting Perspectives: A Paper Ballet",  as it is an art form that fascinates me. I wanted to further explore the figure in space and represent the gesture of movement in my images. It is a great feat for these performers to use their body to convey expression and emotion. I also love it when they collaborate with other artists such as set designers, lighting specialists, costume designers, choreographers and musicians to complete the vision of the director. My love of dance began when I became an ice skater when I was 3 years old. I skated until I was 13. I can attribute my love of music and performing to the environment I grew up in during those formative years. I can still remember the "Ice Capades" I performed in: from being a can-can girl, a skeleton in black light, to kicking my leg high into the air while skating in a chorus line. 

The desire to explore dance in my photography was also inspired by one of my dearest friends, Grier Cooper. Grier has been a professional ballerina since she was 3 and I had been dying to see her en pointe for years! Those pink satin ballet shoes are so enticing, filled with history and symbolism, that I couldn't get them out of my mind. So I decided to create my own imaginary ballet. I immediately began to pour through my archives for inspiration. From Vaslav Nijinsky's and Anna Pavlova's angular movements in The Ballets Russes to the modern, asymmetrical costumes in the theater department of The Bauhaus, my imaginary ballet was being influenced by the Avant Guarde of the 20th century and it magically began taking shape in the form of paper...

The Bauhaus's imprint on me has been indelible. I find myself going back again and again to reference their theories and applications of the ideas they constructed in art, design and technology. I was first introduced to their concepts while studying fine art photography at San Francisco State University. Over the years, I have explored their theories on painting, architecture, typography, applied arts, illustration, color theory and most recently, theatre.

I have been greatly affected by Bauhaus theatre director Oscar Schlemmer's "Triadic Ballet", where he delt largely with the figure in space and how to present it. On top of being completely modern for its time, the doll like movements and the skewed perspectives created by the asymmetrical costumes drew me in. Staatliches Bauhaus was a progressive art school founded by the Berlin architect Walter Gropius during the Weimar Republic from 1919 until 1933. Their premiss that "form follows function" greatly influenced modern design of the 20th century and still reverberates in the applied arts and design in the 21st century. 

The desire to reunite the arts with craft work prevailed in the concepts and constructions that were produced at the school. The teachers, along with the directors Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, were truly the most amazing avant guard artists in their fields: from Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer and Gunta Stölzl to László Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers, and Lyonel Feininger. Each explored new boundries and new approaches to the mediums they worked with. 

To top it off,  I have recently been turned on by Bauhaus contemporary, the avant guard psychologist Rudolf Arnheim and his theories on perspective. In his book "Art and Visual Perception", his discussions on  how we psychologically organize visual material resonated with me and I saw how I could apply his theories in the new work I was just beginning to formulate. His theories specifically on how we automatically interpret shadows inspired me to apply them in place of what the dancers would have normally cast with their bodies and costumes. A shadows fleeting existence has also become a third layer of exploration in this new work. 

I began drafting costumes at the beginning of the year. Sketches turned into costume assemblage instruction manuals which my stylist Mike Kabler, who is also an amazing collage artist (view his work at Paper Prescriptions), was able to use on set. I realized that the medium of paper was exactly what I was looking for in a costume that could really only exist for any length of time on film. The fleeting nature of paper as clothing has intrigued me since I tried wearing a vintage 6T's paper dress to a punk show years ago and quickly learned the longevity of its construction!

In coming posts, I will show the 2 additional elements and will continue to chronicle the journey I carved out for myself in the creation of my Paper Ballet. I still have to build and shoot the sets I plan on placing my Paper Ballet into. The foreground, background and stage floor have already been conceived of and drawn out. Now to carve out some time to create them! I at least gave my self a break and decided not to make them life size.... And then there is the ever elusive shadow and the selection of objects which will take the place of the ones cast by the dancers.

Stay tuned!

Julie Pavlowski Green

June 1, 2013