It may be possible to do without dancing entirely. Instances have been known of young people passing many, many months successively, without being at any ball of any description, and no material injury accrue either to body or mind; but when a beginning is made --- when the felicities of rapid motion have once been, though slightly, felt, --- it must be a very heavy set that does not ask for more. --William Gedney
In the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, dance clubs are a major social attraction. The bands play live and the atmosphere is charged. Watching the couples go round and round on the dance floor (during an extended visit in the spring of 2008), I was struck by something more nuanced than the flashy eroticism we Americans associate with dance in its popular forms: here there was tenderness and playfulness --- a courtliness that hadn't wholly vanished from the social repertoire. And there was also a certain look: an unselfconscious abstraction. It bespoke relaxation; the larger patterns of movement relieved the need constantly to compose one's face. The abstraction imparted an intriguingly archaic aspect to the figures, and I was reminded of much older representations of dancers: those from manuscripts, frescoes and urns.
The black and white prints in this portfolio are silver prints from 35mm negatives. The color photographs are archival pigment prints from medium format negatives.
