"We are not just bodies for your ballet"
For my Women in Art History class, we studied an artist throughout the quarter and made a piece inspired by them. I chose Barbara Kruger, a graphic designer and advertiser, who brought awareness to issues she felt strongly about.
She appropriates commercial images and uses bold typography with direct messaging to transform design and advertising from tools of persuasion into instruments of critique.
My first love of the arts was ballet, but the life of a professional ballerina is not the one sold to you when you are a bright-eyed pre-professional. Directors can see you as a replaceable body to dance the steps in their production, and there is always someone ready to take your place.
But the ballet world needs change. We love the art, but the industry leaves us broken. After I retired, I always wondered how I could shed light on this. I also wrestled with talking about it because ballet is something I love and hold very close to me, and I don't want to bash it.
We dancers, work too hard not to love what we do.
Retiring was one of the most heartbreaking decisions I made; ballet was everything to me. I am so grateful for every moment as a ballerina, but dancers deserve to be paid and treated fairly. Because we are not just bodies or a medium for someone else's choreography, ballet, or production. We are humans first, then artists.
I emulated Kruger's style and appropriated a photograph of the Corps de Ballet (body of the ballet) in Swan Lake, one of my favorites and an extremely classical, well-known ballet. The Corps are often the most overlooked, underpaid, and mistreated. But they also carry the ballet, and are among the hardest workers in the company. "We are not just bodies for your ballet," calls out those in charge of ballet companies to think about how they treat and pay their dancers. It also questions patrons and audiences about how dancers are treated behind the curtain.
This is not true of every company; change is happening, but now as a advertising student who loves graphic design, I hope, with this piece, to lift the curtain and start a conversation between my piece and the viewer, questioning whether dancers are treated as humans or simply as bodies.
Image Sourced from Adobe Stock: https://stock.adobe.com/images/dancers-in-white-tutu-synchronized-dancing/91961780