Lifting Up

In my ongoing project, started during the pandemic, I work with New York City dancers in urban public spaces. The photographs of dance improvisations, accompanied by the dancers’ own words, trace the resuscitation of the dancers and their practice when, in the absence of colleagues and audiences, they reinvented their relation to their bodies and to the discipline of dance. The project, “Lifting Up,” consists of images of unregulated vibrant small-scale human beings giving birth to themselves within sometimes permissive, sometimes overbearing public spaces. The dancers are soaring, cramped, tormented, jubilant, self-involved, tender, curious. In urban, often rough, spaces, that don’t easily shelter or cradle a human being, these dancers jump out as alive, “there,” present, fully aware, complex, full of intelligence and desire. The work celebrates the unscripted and intensely personal act of self-invention. The city takes on a full range of “faces” and the dancers display their unique responses to the city in which they live.