The New Yorker:

Diana Markosian’s images of a once great institution have an aura of decay and pose a question about what motivates the dancers who remain.

By Jennifer Homans

I admit that I don’t usually like photography of dancers. It makes them look like buildings—solid, structured, and immovable. It stops time, the essence of dance, and freezes the dancer in a single moment, often a spectacular or perfect pose. (Look how high! See how beautiful!) Spontaneity, hesitation, speed, imperfection, and the unintended whispers of the body disappear.

Perhaps this is why I was immediately drawn to Diana Markosian’s photographs of women dancers with the Cuban National Ballet. Markosian’s dancers almost never appear solid but instead slump, fray, duplicate, and mist at the edges. An arm dissolves into an X-ray-like wisp, or a froth of tulle. These are melancholy and internal creatures, and I found myself thinking of them as refugees in flight from their own bodies, or perhaps from the decaying world they inhabit. Their youthful frames appear less as spine and bone than as a fluid collection of thoughts and associations held together, barely, by a thin cover of translucent skin.

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