En Pointe explores the dual life of ballet—its glowing ideals and the quiet strain that sustains them. Through a printed four-act publication and a dynamic photo archive, the project follows dancers from first spark to lasting imprint, revealing how wonder and wear, grace and endurance, are inseparable.
The photos were gathered by hand from historic ballet archives, including the NYPL for the Performing Arts, and selected Ballet Academy archives. The texts draw on Suzanne Gordon’s Off-Balance along with interviews and dancer autobiographies, weaving authentic voices into a single visual and written journey.
A two-narrative archival photo-publication that unfolds ballet as both dream and endurance. Across four acts—Prologue, Rehearsal, Stage, and Curtain Call—the book traces parallel stories: one of beauty, recognition, and legacy; the other of sacrifice, strain, and survival. Readers may follow each narrative separately or let them intertwine, revealing how triumph and toll mirror one another.
The book itself is trimmed on a diagonal, splitting the two stories while echoing the “off-balance” pointe shoe—an emblem of fragility, breakage, and hidden pain beneath ballet’s perfection. This physical fracture becomes part of the metaphor, binding form and content into a single gesture.
A dynamic photo archive that responds to the tilt of the phone, uncovering layers of ballet’s life—from moments of pure grace to images of exhaustion and trauma.
The app invites users to control the journey themselves. Gentle tilts show scenes of early practice and delicate beauty; stronger movements unlock photographs marked by fatigue, injury, and recovery. Randomized images with the same intensity rating keep every exploration unique, while the steady gradient from dream to strain echoes the lifelong arc of a dancer’s body.