RECOMMENDED
A friend visiting from abroad last month attended, at my recommendation, the Joffrey Ballet’s excellent Modern Masters program at the Auditorium Theatre. It was her first time seeing ballet and she said she enjoyed the show very much but spent the first few minutes distracted by the physical bodies of the dancers. She said, “I found myself staring, asking, ‘are those real human bodies?’”
Flipping through the pages of the source material for Brendan Fernandes’ “The Master and Form,” which includes the complete reprint of John Willie’s mid-century BDSM fetish magazine “Bizarre” with images of corseted waists cinched to thirteen inches and feet forced into impossible stilettos, one might ask a similar question. And the stiletto is but two inches and a stain ribbon away from the pointe shoe, itself a good-witch stiletto taken to its logical conclusion—and ballet’s iconic fetish object. Fernandes’s show, an installation and performance project in collaboration with design firm Norman Kelley and the Joffrey Ballet Academy is a quietly elegant look at the pleasure of pain in the name of perfection.
Sculpture devices—wooden tripods, steel scaffolding, ropes hanging from the ceiling, are installed in the sunny, warm rooms of the Graham Foundation building. Four dancers from the Joffrey Academy, clad in simple black leotards and tights, each took a position at a wooden device, designed to facilitate a deeper center split, a higher arabesque or a more perfectly aligned passe. The dancers held these positions for long durations of time, pausing occasionally to counter-stretch as needed, in a demonstration of the countless hours of painstaking—and frequently painful—training required to create the super-human bodies with gravity-defying capabilities my friend marveled at on stage.
One dancer sat on the floor in a wide second position at a giant hinge, every now and then pressing it open further until her legs were at a 180 degree angle. Another’s station was stand with cross pieces at ribcage and knee-height, designed to indicate the position of leg and arm for a passe—a position in which the dancer stands on one leg, the other bent with the toe pointing at (or ideally above) the knee. Gazing at him holding this pose for an impossibly long period of time, sweat pouring down his neck, his face placid, not betraying the discomfort he surely felt, the image of a crucifixion came to mind: the artist on the cross, sacrificing physical ease to come millimeters closer to the ideal. Periodically the dancers would leave their posts to gather along walls and the scaffolding structures to run through barre exercises, each one taking turns marking the eight-count phrases in their native languages of Spanish, Japanese and Italian. Otherwise the performance was silent, save the scrape of feet practicing tendu and ronde de jamb.
Attendees were welcome to move between rooms as they wished, close enough to witness every wobble of ankle and rivulet of sweat. In an after-show discussion, Fernandes, himself a former ballet dancer whose artistic practice often includes themes of physical endurance, remarked that the devices were meant to serve as both burden and support. They also helped illustrate the architectural lines of the ballet form and, when not in use, had a beautifully ominous presence in the bright white rooms with their oak trim in the Prairie-style mansion. One final performance will take place at the closing of the exhibition on March 10.
At the Graham Foundation, 4 West Burton Place, (312) 787-4071. Gallery hours Wednesday – Saturday 11am-6pm. Performance, Saturday, March 10, 1-3pm. Free.
