Couture. Mirage. Ballet

A dance. A movement of the soul... An unspoken thought... An unplucked flower... Its scent excites speculatively, and you can’t feel the velvety stem. It always escapes and can’t be captured in viewer’s memory like a line of the verse or a sequence of notes can. It has no objectiveness — it is all woven of infinitely short and elusive fragments of being.

Choreographic pattern beckons with its perfection, and takes the viewer into the creative space. Here, each master has his own language, in which he narrates the story through the movements of the dancers. What a delight it is to unravel the etymology of a gesture! At times it is unspeakably regretful that while sitting in the audience and watching a continuous flow of dance we don't have enough time to realize the beauty of each choreographic word: every separate movement, step, incredibly wonderful head turn, an impossible body flight... But whatever the eye doesn’t catch — the camera does. Live dance is like an oral speech, captured on camera it becomes the art of calligraphy.

For almost two decades of its existence the International ballet festival Dance Open is manifesting a strong desire (almost an obsession) to get to the point, to the very core of the excellence of the dancers, from which an amazing world filled with creative energy is growing. To examine, to decrypt the magic and encoding of movement at its very beginning. And every year we share our discoveries — in dance and in the art of its capturing. For the third season in a row, we are presenting our audience an opportunity to see the work of photographers who are as much in love with dance as we are. They are able to stop the moment at the very takeoff – and allow you to see whatever escapes during the show.

The exhibition "Couture. Mirage. Ballet" combines works of Russian photographer Alexander Yakovlev and American photographers Ken Browar and Deborah Ory. Fascinating images from “The Mirages" series by Alexander Yakovlev are a poetic dedication to the ephemeral essence of the art of ballet, its power to raise emotions from air, light and shadow. Unique and stunning NYC Dance Project series by Ken and Deborah stand at the intersection of high fashion and choreography capturing the dance of ballet stars who are wearing creations by famous couturiers.

Ballet photography is an extraordinary phenomenon: here every piece is a self-sufficient work of art that absorbed the talent of the photographer, choreographer, and dancer, but in order for it to truly come alive, it requires one more key element — the responsive soul of the viewer.