growing up in new york city, Rhona Bitner experienced ballet for the first time as a child at Lincoln Center. Later in life, her artistic practice centered on spaces of performance and their relationship to the camera (as illustrated by sweeping series like Listen and Stage). Bitner finds “symmetry between the camera and the theater. Both are dark boxes through whose apertures…we try to make sense of the world outside.”
In 2019, a friend of hers presented her with a box of discarded pointe shoes he had discovered on the street twelve years earlier. On closer inspection, Bitner found names scribbled on the soles. She was now the custodian of shoes that had been worn by some of the New York City Ballet’s principal dancers and company members.
Unique as a fingerprint, each pair of pointe shoes is customized by the dancer who wears them through a ritual pummeling, scraping, and sewing to perfect the fit. But it is the act of dancing on pointe—an otherwise physically improbable act made possible by the papier-mâché boxes in the toes—that has resulted in these singular portraits. The extreme close-up reveals every thread and tear—evidence of a dancer’s gift, dedication, and determination.
—eugenia bell
