Dancing Alone

 

 

Music - The Swell Season (Glen Hansard & Markéta Irglová)

Artist Statement:

When I first started working on this project, I thought it was going to be about loss. The original thoughts and impressions I got from my song were of loneliness and the pain that come from being lost. However, as I began to put together images of loss, I realized that I was instead creating a story of being found.

In her essay Seeing, Annie Dillard talks about a moment of pure clarity. In her words, “Something broke and something opened.” I experienced a similar moment while working on this project. I was sifting through several of the images trying to put them together in a way that made sense, and I stopped on the image of the dancer looking in the mirror. As I studied it, the word found popped into my head. Something broke and something opened, and I realized what my project was actually about.

Finding oneself is not an easy process. Even more difficult is facing the self we find. Dillard talks about seeing in terms of the world around us, and with my project, I chose to talk about seeing in terms of oneself.

Mirrors play a huge role in the seeing of oneself, both symbolically and literally. When we look into a mirror we are literally facing ourselves. However, the way we see ourselves in that mirror goes far beyond physical characteristics. When we look into a mirror we’re not only reminded of what we look like, but of who we are. As such, the relationship we have with the mirror became a focal point of my project.

I chose to use a dancer as my subject because dance is one of my favorite artistic mediums. I believe that it is one of the most raw and beautiful ways to express emotion. Dancers are incredible storytellers, and telling a story with one’s body can be just as powerful as telling it with words. The journey this dancer goes through in this series of images is a story of moving through loss and other difficulties in order to find and truly see oneself.

As mentioned above, the hardest thing about finding oneself is facing that self. And often we have to face ourselves before we can face anything else. For this reason, I chose not to show her face clearly until after she had seen it herself. We don’t see her for who she truly is, until she has done so for herself. And as she finds and recognizes the value there, so do we. 

Sometimes it's okay to dance alone.

~Brontë Campbell