The Brooklyn Rail

Ballet holds a self-conscious place in popular culture. There’s a frustration, for example, with trends like “balletcore,” which appropriate ballet’s pink palettes, bow and jewel details, and satin and tulle fabrics. Models who have never gone on pointe before donning a pair of Freed of Londons for a photoshoot are hired over dancers who have put in well beyond their ten-thousand hours. Such fashion and casting choices can make ballet seem saccharine and, even worse, easy, deemphasizing the athleticism and artistry required.

Yet, I disagree with visual artist Karon Davis, who said in a November 2023 interview for the New York Times about her “Beauty Must Suffer” series, “I feel like the art I’ve seen before on dancers has always just been about what happens onstage, which is perfection. But I want to show what happens before you get to that point—all the labor, all the sacrifice, all the bloody toes and the sore muscles.” Perhaps Davis hasn’t seen some recent representations of ballet in film, like the movie Black Swan or the Starz series Flesh and Bone.

Davis’s “Beauty Must Suffer” series debuted with a multi-room installation of life-sized ballet figures at Manhattan’s Salon 94 gallery in October 2023. Davis, who comes from a performing arts family, did use real dancers to model for her plaster casts, but the series title reinforces the idea that blood sacrifices underpin ballet’s bejeweled, pink sweetness. While the fashion industry overemphasizes superficial beauty, the artistic representations’ insistence on suffering creates, in my eyes, a stifling binary. A performing career’s complex spectrum of human emotion and experience should not be so reduced.

Curtain Call, Davis’s newest work in the highly publicized “Beauty Must Suffer” series, places ballet into the mainstream—or, at least, into a kind of stream: the flow of tourists and commuters on Manhattan’s High Line who create little eddies of traffic around the larger-than-life ballerina figure.

On the spring day that I pilgrimage to the High Line’s 23rd Street overlook to see the sculpture, white crocuses sprout across the raised grass bed serving as the pedestal. The figure’s tutu is short and stiff, emphasizing the length of her legs in her deep bowed position. In the rose bouquet that cascades from her arms, each petal is unnaturally smooth and plump. The blooms call to mind the flawless cartoon rose from Beauty and the Beast. (Again, pop culture insists on a beauty-suffering binary.)

Apart from the richly colored roses, the figure retains the dappled surface and white color of her plaster cousins from Davis’s previous exhibition. The bronze is created from Davis’s plaster cast of real-life ballerina Jasmine Perry; the earlier plaster work bowed in front of a mountain of pointe shoes in the Salon 94 exhibition. According to the gallery’s press materials, the “Beauty Must Suffer” series “examines the life and labor of Black dancers in their pursuit of a perfect form within the historically European tradition of ballet.” In the Salon 94 exhibition, in addition to showing a dancer icing her knee and another taking a smoke break, one of Davis’s figures pancakes her shoes with makeup to match Black skin—an extra step that white dancers whose skin tones match “European pink” SKUs don’t have to complete. The figures’ Blackness is highlighted by the contrast with their white plaster surfaces. We might even think of Curtain Call’s rough finish in contrast to Jeff Koons’s 2017 Rockefeller Plaza installation, the mirror-polished, Barbie-blonde Seated Ballerina who coyly reaches down her pearly pink leg.

Still, if we are focusing on the subset of Black ballet dancers conforming to a white standard of beauty, Davis’s notion that all beauty must suffer muddies the message. Taking Curtain Call out of the context of the Salon 94 exhibition, the sculpture seems to have even less to do with the racial themes the curatorial text claims.

While the figure’s pose in Curtain Call is every inch the ballerina en révérence, giving thanks to her audience, the expression is vacant. The ballerina’s brow does not crease with emotion, as one would expect of an artist giving her final bow. Whether her expression is left intentionally blank or whether the artist couldn’t work enough detail into the material before the bronze casting process, I do not know. But without an emotional cue from the sculpted face to work off of, I feel a struggle to connect with what should be a touching moment. I walk around to view the ballerina from all angles: straight on, looking through her crown to her slicked-back hair, in profile, as I approached her, and even from behind, peeking cheekily underneath her tutu. This 360-degree access, more than most audiences have to a dancer on a proscenium, could speak to Davis’s own perspective. While she did not progress beyond childhood dance lessons, she certainly saw a performer’s life from all angles watching her parents and late sister in their careers.

Still, I’m hunting to find poignancy in this dancer “frozen in reverence to her audience,” as the caption states. I circle, sit, and stare at her blank face and am about to turn away when the realization dawns: that audience is not me. Whether it’s a tourist who knows nothing about ballet and would mistake a fashion model for a professional ballerina, or me with my insider knowledge of the art form—we are not the point. In another 2023 interview, Davis told the Guardian, “Every time a dancer steps on stage it is birth. There is a connection with a higher power that the audience is just a spectator of and has the privilege to witness.” With Curtain Call, Davis seems to be hinting toward the spiritual scale. If the High Line is the ballerina’s stage, the latitudinal stretch of 23rd Street to the East River is her theater house, and the surrounding brick and glass towers soar as curtain wings or scenery. Her reverence is directed at a vast city, the sky, and perhaps whatever heavens lie beyond. In this performance, we humans walking the High Line are as insignificant as the tiny crocuses underfoot.

I feel a sense of dissatisfaction being demoted from stakeholder to, in Davis’s words, spectator. As an audience member, I want to actively participate, not just witness something going on between an artist and her god. And yet, when I turn away from Curtain Call, and as I recall the lone ballerina now in my mind’s eye, I do feel an affinity for her. Without a care for beauty or a single suffering thought in my mind, I too, would dance for no one but the sky.