music box dancer....

Wendy Stefansson. Music Box Dancer. Photogram on silver gelatine paper. 2003

When I was a kid, my girlfriends and I all had little jewellery boxes that played music when you opened the lids. Inside, there was a tiny figure of a ballerina — always in a pink tutu, always en pointe — which would pop up and pirouette. Most of the time the music was from Swan Lake.

Behind the tiny dancer was always a small mirror. As girls, we would view our own images in the mirrors with the ballerinas in front of them. Standing between us and our reflections was this idea of what it meant to be a girl.

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On March 8th, 2003 — International Women’s Day — Canada’s National Post newspaper published a fashion editorial about a look I believe they described as “ballerina grunge.” It was part ballet-inspired, part bohemian. Part wabi sabi — the beautiful in the imperfect, the tattered and the bedraggled. The elegant in the earthy. The feminine in the flawed.

I was working in the darkroom quite a lot at the time, and started playing around with the newspaper pages, using them to make photograms — a technique in which one exposes light-sensitive paper through or around a readymade object. In this case, the clippings.

Some of the images on one side of the newsprint lined up in interesting ways with images on the reverse. In one instance, a small image of a dancer overlapped with a closer-up image of the same dancer’s upper body and face. It looked like the music box of my childhood, but all grown up and a little bit darker. A little more fraught.

One of about a million moments in my life of reinterpreting what it means to occupy a female body in this world.

stage directions....

All of the photos in this post are from the CBC's video
of Alberta Ballet's 2016 production of Balletlujah.
I wish I could play it for you, but it seems to have disappeared
from the internet.

I wish you could see this.

The work is a single act from Alberta Ballet’s production of Balletlujah. The dancers dance to k.d. lang’s transcendent version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.

The stage is empty. The scene is set.

Two young women circle each other, keeping eye contact. Tentative at first. Wondering. Searching. Risking and reckless, as love always is. Meeting at centre stage.

There is a man, achingly and quintessentially alone. He moves the way a cellos sounds; in long, lovely strokes. Deep and lonely.

His dance is an agony. A question. A grappling. He pivots around an absent centre, in what would be called a death spiral, if he were skating, and if he had a partner.

A man and a woman dance as if no-one else exists.

A young woman, full with maternity, strokes her belly. The single man reappears, on his back, kicking and spasming like an insect in death throes. He rights himself. Finds a rope to hang from, and swings from it.

The young mother returns to find him dangling.

A group of people converge, then disperse. The stage is empty again.

The two young women return; circle each other. Come together in their symmetry. Find their completion in each other; in a kiss.

Love is not a victory march.

It’s a cold, and it’s a broken hallelujah.

Leonard Cohen

all wrapped up in it, and completely undone....

None of these photos are mine. I captured all of them from a
video posted by Gloria Franchi on youtube.com.
They accompany Leonard Cohen's song, "Dance Me to the End of Love."
They so beautifully and elegantly capture the feeling of the song.

Dance me to the end of love.

Leonard Cohen