NYTimes.com: JR, the French street artist who specializes in large-scale international projects, is taking his collaboration with New York City Ballet off of the floor and onto the stage.
This winter his 6,500-square-foot photo of City Ballet dancers on the floor of the promenade of the David H. Koch Theater went viral, inspiring balletomanes to post pictures of themselves lying on the floor next to the dancers on social media sites. So the company came up with a perhaps more audacious plan for the spring: they asked JR to direct a ballet for the stage.
3 comments:
I have been a fan of JR’s work for several years (and a long time fan of street art in general), and was very happy when he received the TED Prize in 2011. (According to the TED website, this spring HBO will release a documentary of JR’s Inside Out project.) The photo collage piece he did with the New York City Ballet is stunning. I will be extremely excited to see the work he choreographs, with the assistance of Peter Martins. As JR had never seen a ballet before working with the NYCB, it seems this project will help open up the experience of attending a dance performance to a much wider audience.
I love to create, and expressing through art and dance are two of my favorites. This title instantly captured my attention and I was shocked when I saw the photo of the ballet. The image is stunning and relatively simplistic. Its composed of dancers and fabric and simple lighting, but the combination is breath taking. Its beautiful, new, creative, simplistic, attention grabbing, and overall amazing. I knew nothing about the street artist JR prior to reading the article, but I'm glad I looked into him so more and saw some of his other work. His stuff if great and has a fun style. I bookmarked his page and will reference if again some day. Happy I choose to look at this one.
I found it little bit surprising that JR was asked to direct a ballet even though his work and experience were in more visual arts, and he had no prior experience choreographing. I have no doubt that he will be able to create an excellent piece, but it will be interesting to see how he approaches the choreography differently from someone who has had formal training. I wonder what the process was like to transfer visual, more static artistry to movement and if was necessary for JR to change his way of thinking in order to do so, especially since there seems to be a pretty big difference between the two kinds of work.
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