Chocolat après ballet by Mircea Sorin Albutiu

the photographer-poet  seeking stardust; backstage; seeking good and bad, as he must; through the madness of a dream passage.   - Gigi Căciuleanu; Paris, 2020.

In the wings of ballet productions, a sound similar to that in the starting stalls of racehorses before touching the track can be heard, coming from the dancers’ heaving breathes, from the permanent stimulation of the muscles, of stretches, lunges, leaps, nobody sits still in the wings, everyone moves constantly, muscles are warmed up, tone is maintained, everyone sweats, everyone breathes in and out, feet are arched, steps are rehearsed, the most expressive position is sought, the safest one, the one that won’t break a bone, vertebrae, or tear a ligament. The wings are another stage, hidden from the audience’s eyes, but one which communicates with the light-infused stage. In the stage lights, ballet dancers are effervescent, powerful, propelled into the air by gravity-defying force, but once they retreat into the wings, their posture suddenly changes. You see them sitting, holding their heads, soaked with sweat, as if hurled to shore by a forceful storm, the effort bends them over, puts them on their knees, they gather their strength in the positions of galley slaves, where work is a sysiphistic struggle. You, you who haven’t broken a sweat, are seized by a feeling of uselessness watching them, as felt by a sterile woman watching another give birth. It is pain, a howl of the flesh and blood that you see before you, but it is uplifting. It is a call to life in its ‘continuous form’, you sense that the human being is beautiful in being pressed for time, laid to the earth by decline and ruin, where he or she is considered weak, sinful, labile, the subject of degradation, abandoned to time, years, and God. In the body. And above else, it is beautiful. - Mihaela Virlan