Corps de Ballet: Cleaners or Contemporary Dance Stars?
EVERY DAY PHOTOGRAPHERS AROUND THE WORLD looking for new ways to tell stories or to capture what we previously did not notice. We choose interesting photo projects and ask their authors what they wanted to say. This week we are publishing a draft by a native Renna Marion Pourier dedicated to invisible outsiders, without which our life is impossible, to cleaners and cleaners. For the photographer, they are representatives of the profession, to which everyone can turn in difficult times, and at the same time anonymous army, like a corps de ballet, using the capabilities of its body.
The corps de ballet is dedicated to women and men working as cleaners throughout France. It all started with our acquaintance with theater director Mohamed El Khatib: he called me to remove Corinne Dada - the cleaner with whom he made a dance production. The performance was built around two women - in fact, the cleaners Corinne and the dancer Elodie Gezu. They have one thing in common: for both, their body is the main tool in their profession. I filmed Corinne for several days, everywhere following her with the camera: so I began to notice and admire the movements and gestures that she repeated every day. On the developed film it became especially clear that many of these movements look very choreographic, so I decided to concentrate on this aspect, and not just to document its everyday life. This idea, moreover, fits perfectly into the concept of the production, but I also liked the fact that I went to the cleaning profession, so to speak, from the back door - the pictures left room for interpretation. This is how a whole project originated, which I led for several years, taking pictures of completely different people whom I met during the tour of the performance. By the way, everyone agreed to play with ease, on one condition - so that they would not have to do something heavy.
With each of the project’s heroes, I spent some time at work, watching their actions, and then I simply asked them to repeat the most familiar movements, taking them out of context. Turning them into something else. Of course, sweeping without a broom is not easy, but all these actions were automatic, because for my heroes this is part of the daily routine. During each session, I tried to grasp the person’s identity through gestures, a special, unique plastic and a way to interact with space. It seems to me that the shooting took place in an atypical setting, devoid of signs and the "hooks" of their daily life. At the same time, I didn’t put them in a too alien environment; we weren’t even far from their place of work. For some of the details in the photos, you can guess that they were made near residential complexes, courtyards or schools. This creates a contrast between the banality of space and the poetry of gesture.
Heroes of the series for me are primarily people, and only then - representatives of the profession. A similar view of things makes us all equal. The task of this project, in fact, was the revision of our attitude and understanding of a certain profession - it is a reflection, an attempt to look behind the cliché and see a person, his life, his past, his personality. All this is expressed through the smallest details, from posture to clothing. I consciously wanted to move away from the genre of documentary photography, without breaking the connection with everyday life. I like to explore the idea of emancipation through body and movement. The body is a constant element of my work.
When I first started doing photography, I was strongly influenced by photojournalism and documentary. But then gradually I began to be interested in more detached practitioners, while at the same time trying to maintain an intuitive approach close to me to the objects of my research. In my pictures there is no entertainment, I am attracted by details and everyday life, which allow us to interpret what we have seen and do not make us hostages of emotional perception. It also means that I trust the viewer and his ability and desire to see.
I do not have a task to change or expose something: I think that a photo does not give answers, but asks questions. I like how these images put us with questions and doubts: who exactly is shown in the picture? What is this man doing? What is the meaning of his or her gesture? This makes it possible to pause for reflection on this particular work and the people who do it - I’m interested in the gap between who we are and what we look like or trying to be.
