Ballet in the Age
of Instagram
By Jaclyn Anglis
Luis Pons, a New Yorker who suffered from depression after falling ill in 2011, began street photography as a coping mechanism after a photographer friend suggested it to him. When Pons began to feel better, he wanted to photograph people who looked vibrant.
“Once I decided I wanted to find some dynamic subjects, I said, ‘Well let me look for a dancer,’” Pons said.
He started with flamenco, and did that for about six months before moving on to ballet. And when he first photographed a ballerina at Lincoln Center in 2012, he fell in love with the art of her arabesque. He wanted to put that old art back into the mainstream, so others could appreciate it. Six months later, he began posting photos of ballerinas in city landscapes on Instagram to complement his ballet photography website and to reach a larger audience. He quickly gained a following, which has reached 31,000 users.
Pons shares photos of ballerinas all over New York, from Central Park and the Brooklyn Bridge to abandoned buildings, graffiti-laden walls and the subway. Pons said he is part of a revival of ballet driven by social media, which ballerinas and ballet instructors alike have begun using to promote their work. Though ballet is an old art form that had its “golden age” in the 70s and 80s, people are clearly paying attention today — on their smartphones. And Pons is reinterpreting that art and bringing it to a broader audience and a new generation of social media savvy youth.
“I think it’s the juxtaposition, it’s seeing something you ordinarily don’t see, a ballerina, in an urban space, and she’s dancing,” Pons said. “And I think ballet, even if someone’s never been to ballet, it’s one of those art forms that people really appreciate.”
Armed with a Nikon D600 with a Sigma Arts Series 35 millimeter lens, Pons goes on adventures with dancers to find the perfect shot in New York landscapes, even in places where he’s never seen before. He’s never been one to take photos in Times Square, or other promenades where people typically like to take photographs.
Instead, he goes to places like Roosevelt Island, where he photographed Juliet Doherty, a 17-year-old ballerina from San Francisco. While on the sliver of land between Queens and Manhattan, Pons was looking for lines in the environment that would match hers and trying to find a moment where he could meld the dancer into the environment.
And he found that—while climbing off one of the seawalls. A little risky, but he got the shots he wanted.
“The area that we chose by that sea was sort of an abandoned space and I don’t see it as being gritty or ugly because for whatever reason, abandoned spaces like that are very beautiful to me,” Pons said. “There’s something beautiful about the way nature reclaims something we made. I almost feel like I’m taking different types of beauty and melding them together.”
Considering his large amount of followers on Instagram, it seems as though people agree with his sentiment.
Sheena Annalise, the artistic director and founder of Arch Contemporary Ballet, said that today, social media helps keep the classic art relevant to a broader audience—including people who don’t get the chance to see the art live. The age of social media, she said, makes ballet more of a community.
“Just because of the experience that the digital age has brought to it, a lot of people now recognize how hard ballet dancers work or what the experience at a ballet is through photo and through video,” Annalise said.
Just ask Juliet Doherty, the ballerina Pons photographed in Roosevelt Island and the subway. Doherty, who comes from four generations of dancers and took her first pre-ballet class when she was 3, wants to dance professionally someday. Social media is a platform where she can display her work to her peers in the meantime.
The San Francisco Ballet School student has 134,000 followers on her Instagram page, a result of sharing ballet photos.
“I kind of realized that maybe by sharing a picture and a little bit about what I’m doing or every once in awhile an inspirational little quote or saying or something like that, people actually relate to it,” she said.
She has taken photos in San Francisco, her hometown in New Mexico, and wherever she travels. She meets up with photographers like Pons, who favor unique locations.
“I guess it shows the versatility of dance and how you can kind of mesh something that’s soft and pretty and put it in a more industrial location,” she said. “It kind of captures more of an audience. They might see it and think, ‘Oh, I never thought dance could be experienced this way, outside a studio.’”
A positive side effect of ballet through social media, said Annalise, is breaking down those perceptions of the art and making it more accessible to the general public. The Arch Facebook page has nearly 10,000 fans, and most of them aren’t dancers. When they started, about 90 percent of the fan base were dancers, while today non-dancers account for almost 40 percent of the audience connected to Facebook or Instagram.
“It still is considered kind of a lavish event to go to the ballet,” Annalise said. “Not so much as it was back then, but even today, a lot of people might not go see classic works, and through these websites, we’re able to show it to a broader audience.”
A broad audience is what Pons aims for. While studio photographers have control over where and how they shoot, Pons welcomes the challenges of restricted or risky settings precisely for the compelling variations they offer.
He sees ballet photography as an artistic experience for both himself and his audience. He seeks an emotion that will guide him how to set up a shot, and wants it to evoke an emotion in his viewer, so they will linger on the picture.
“I think what I’d like to do with my photos is not just take a dance portrait but also create a scene that evokes some types of storytelling so I don’t have to explain the image,” said Pons. “The image explains itself.”
