"Fleeting Perspectives: A Paper Ballet" Part 6

DANCERS

Selecting the dancers and combining them with a corresponding backdrop has been a labor of love and a very interesting game of mental chess. From the beginning I have drawn out, cut out, talked about and visualized the final images and how they would relate to each other but until I selected a dancer today and dropped her into the first backdrop, I never knew quite what they were going to look like.

Trying to balance form, shape, contrast and relationships was a mental exercise in which I spent many hours thinking about how each one affected the other. I was very sensitive to the visual impact of lighter costumes with darker backdrops. The interactions and contradictions that arose from placing different dancers together, as well as the individual dancers within each environment, made for a multidimensional puzzle to figure out. And I love a good puzzle!

I could feel the tension between the two dancers due to the nature of their costumes and body language. When an angular modern form and a fluid ballet gesture would clash and then come together in a new narrative, it gave them an almost subconscious connection. This tension is intensified by the backdrops themselves, which contain angular geometric forms next to natural undulating shapes found in nature.

The higher horizons in the background coupled with the oval cloud and feathered foregrounds upon first analysis already appear to work better with a single dancer. The framing of the image looks like a peep hole into the easter egg. The open stage with the minimal wave foreground gives the single dancer and her eventual shadow space to interact.

Gravity is the invisible force that dancers tango with every time the step onto the floor. In this series, I am trying to depict gravity by giving it a place in the space between the dancers and their environment. The magnetic push and pull of the various forces in the image is the underlying character, one that I believe is the basis of each fleeting perspective.

While selecting the final combinations, I almost felt like I was writing a musical score: composing, arranging, rearranging, and balancing each image as if they were musical notes. I decided to lay them out in a grid 4 across and 4 down, laying them out in my favorite shape: the square. I feel a sense of balance in a square and I see more clearly the composition of an image within a square format.

As a young art student, I was instructed by my teacher Carol Ashford to draw out my compositions in a small thumbnail to see the image from a different perspective. To this day, I apply this wisdom to most of my artwork. It helps to see the shapes more clearly at a smaller scale than if they encompassed my entire visual field.

In this same vein, I made contact sheets of my favorite backdrops and dancers. I then cut them out to play with and arrange as needed. I could immediately see that the lighter overall costumes combined well with the darker, more contrasting backdrops. At this smaller size it became apparent to me there were 7 general groups of dancers and 16 backdrops. What was missing was the shot of the checkerboard floor with the waves in the foreground in silhouette. I have decided to shoot this last backdrop when I photograph the shadows later this month.

It was interesting to see visually how different the genres of dance depicted in this Paper Ballet ended up in the layout. I charted the combinations of these forms of Ballet, Modern Dance and Contemporay Ballet and saw that their positions in juxtaposition to each other appears to be a cohesive and pleasing balance. Written out on the page, they almost looked like those old dance step diagrams where you would following the foot prints to learn the moves.

I recently went to go see the Peter Stackpole exhibition "Bridging the Bay" at The Oakland Museum of California. It was a gorgeous collection of photographs he had taken while the Golden Gate Bridge was being built. Each image was truly a master piece. What caught my attention besides the mindblowing compositions he is famous for, was the creamy almost coffee stained quality to the tone of the paper. The deep rich blacks in the fiber based paper were mesmerizing. The richness and range of these inky blacks made me giddy with delight.

In my opinion, the depth of a printed black on fiber paper still cannot be matched in our modern day inkjet prints, close but no cigar. The matte boards echoed the same tonality found in the paper. The combination of the paper tone and the dense rich black are exactly what I hope to replicate in the final prints.

The big question still remains whether I will hang all 16 images as a cohesive whole in the square layout I have been working in or allow these images to hang individually, independent of each other. At the moment, I have proceeded by selecting the combinations based on the interaction between all 16 images. Luckily, I am more than happy with these initial results. The last step of placing corresponding but unrelated shadows beneath my dancers will be the final touch. For now, I will be working on these final selections, combining the dancers with their backdrops.

Next stop, shadow land.

Julie Pavlowski Green
Saturday, November 2, 2013