Essay | Anna Khachiyan
These days, when anything can be (and is) legitimately photographed, images of institutionally beautiful things like the dance have become a sort of ideological copout among so-called serious photographers. With Behind the Curtain, Armen Danilian reinvents the ballet image by recalibrating the ailing apparatus through which people have come to view it over time. What the overhaul amounts to is an incisive look into the parallel universe that is at the core of the cultural fortress formed by Russia’s top dance companies, the Mariinsky Ballet, the Bolshoi Ballet and the Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg.
The allure of the images isn’t that they’re beautiful, though faced with the visual evidence, it’s hard not to make a case for the beauty of both their content and execution. But, now more than ever, that’s really not the point. What’s more important is the photographer’s intuition for seizing the formal complexity of an event with its essential meaning intact, or what Cartier-Bresson called the “decisive moment” of an unfolding but finite series captured—fortuitously—in a single frame.
The classic notion of photography as the most consummately surrealist of the visual arts comes to mind. Armen’s photographs back up this idea with interpretation to spare. Not only are they surreal by definition of the medium, but doubly so by virtue of the content. The bizarre, the disorienting, the androgynous, the incongruous and the downright asinine are the currency of the ongoing project. Oddly enough, their idiosyncrasy is precisely what makes them so familiar. To the extent that a photograph is defined by what it portrays, the subjects here are people first and professionals only in the parenthetical sense.
Like the ballet itself, the images are at once cerebral and emotive—the successful hybrid of shrewd planning and spontaneous action. Armen’s forte is moments, and moments within moments abound here, to say the least. Not one to shy from irony, or even the absurd, he captures split-second expressions of emotional conflict and cultural dissonance, but also the decidedly earthly beauty of his human subjects, whether they are dancers or merely security guards and stagehands. All the while, the old caveat holds: beauty, in this case, isn’t some highfaluting, rhetorical attempt at assigning universal value where none exists. Rather, it’s a glimmer of recognition. The ruse may be a pretty girl bent at an impossible angle or a virile youth tensed in physical distress, but the draw is the undeniable imprint of humanness.
As far as the surreal is implicated, there’s also the matter of the (invisible but indivisible) artistic process itself. The ambassador of this time-lapsed exchange is, of course, the photographer, who aspires not to engineer or doctor reality but, in his own words, to record it incrementally and allow the salvaged parts to reassemble through an organic, editorial convergence. Armen’s unique position takes him, literally, behind the curtain, granting him unprecedented access to the inner sanctum of an almost fastidiously insular industry. He is concerned with the interaction of the dancers, both physical and psychological, as well as the spaces they inhabit beyond the stage—dressing rooms, ateliers, hotel suites, streets and corridors. Rarely does an artist, let alone one this young, so deftly navigate uncharted territory, but Armen’s dual status as an insider and onlooker compels him to break old expectations in a subgenre that is too often defined by cliché. Although grandeur proves inevitable, no aspect of the environment is deemed too mundane for the photographer’s lens.
Then again, Armen has been hanging out behind the scenes of the Russian ballet industry for what is arguably a lifetime in twenty-something terms, forging meaningful relationships with the dancers along the way. This holistic immersion has allowed him to attain a level of transparency that their admirers (the fans) and their superiors (executives, agents, etc) are too “apart” to enjoy. Going accepted but largely unnoticed, he can infiltrate the environment without disrupting the delicate ambience of authenticity that remains the prize of the contemporary photographer.
Some of the subjects are caught off guard, some remain completely unaware, others, fully complicit, vamp it up for the camera, and others still are so used to its presence that they go about their business without so much as flinching. Performers, of course, are a special breed of people in that they are acclimated to the flashing lights of outside scrutiny, but in this case, things are a hell of a lot different. The situations that Armen conveys best are intimate non-affairs, full of candor and vulnerability and, perhaps, a little bit of youthful debauchery, those moments when no one is watching and everything happens “among friends.” He is there during their rehearsals, there on their cigarette breaks, there when they let their guard down, there when they lose their inhibitions and there—in many cases the first person they see—as they make their triumphant exits from the stage.
The result is a menagerie of sideways glances, inside jokes, offhand bloopers and private moments cut up and thrown together again in a continuous, sublime stream. Armen documents the compressed and accelerated reality of touring as if in slow-motion, capturing what are in effect archival fragments of intensity. In response, viewers fill the associative gaps with their own psychic linkages. The images affect with shifting but omnipresent force, from the brutal, agitated physicality of a young man splayed across a studio floor to the moody absorption of a faceless girl observing a spectacle through collapsible doors. This combination of awkward beauty and warped chronology only reflects the dreamlike atmosphere that has become the photographer’s itinerant home away from home.
The message behind the pictures speaks as much to the conscious eye as to the subconscious mind. The ideas they explore are by nature universal ones: collective memory, culture shock, nostalgia, wanderlust and the ceaseless human quest for beauty or, more accurately, harmony. At the same time, Armen avoids the threat of sentimentalism by constantly shifting perspective and staying wisely out of the limelight.
All of the above is prefaced, as it were, on the act of looking. There are audience members looking at dancers, dancers looking out into the audience, dancers looking at each other, dancers looking at themselves, not to mention, mirrors—countless reflective surfaces, makeshift and real, that replicate the action over and over again. As preamble to everything is the unseen fact that it is the photographer looking back at this exotic, ephemeral microcosm of the real world who is responsible for preserving its essence and picking up the discourse with a whole new audience. Lucky for us, he happens to be looking from a very special place.
—Anna Khachiyan, April 12, 2008, New York City