Collier Schorr – Writing a Letter: Akerman Ballet, Act 1
Introduction by Peggy Phelan. For many years, Collier Schorr has been creating a ballet inspired by Chantal Akerman’s film Je tu il elle. Following the film’s themes of transparency, sexuality, shame, and love, Schorr has directed a piece consisting of videotaped dances in which she includes herself as a character alongside her fellow dancers. “Akerman played herself in Je tu il elle,” she says, “because she knew no actress could be as awkward as she was. I feel the same.” Incredibly intimate, risky, and questioning aspects of age, gender, and racial norms historically underrepresented in ballet, Schorr wanted “to tell another story, based on the ones that Chantal Akerman had told me, about power and desire and compulsion and essentially free speech in the male-dominated field…” In Writing a Letter: Akerman Ballet, Act 1, Schorr has pulled a large collection of film stills from the first act of this ballet. Published as a stand-alone document of one artist vigorously in conversation with another’s work, it is also an example of the way queer histories can be shared and cared for through adoration, adaptation, and repetition. A heady act of love, in itself. As part of the New York art world of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Collier Schorr mined, in her early work, the vernacular of postmodernism to create photographs that toe the line between documentary and fiction. Often using her subjects allegorically, Schorr navigates the auspices of identity politics to ask beguiling questions about the nomenclature of selfhood. Her range of imagery, from atmospheric portraiture to hard glamour, has been used in advertising campaigns for Louis Vuitton, Saint Laurent Paris, Commes des Garçons, Hermès, and Calvin Klein, to name a few. Schorr has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe and is represented by 303 Gallery in New York and Modern Art in London. Schorr’s work is also represented in many public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Jewish Museum, and the Walker Art Center. Her essays have also appeared in various museum catalogs and magazines. In the last few years, Schorr undertook to adapt Chantal Akerman’s seminal and personal film Je tu il elle into a full-length dance piece made specifically for video and to be published as a movement script. Schorr was appointed to the Yale faculty in 2003 and is currently senior critic in photography.
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