Chocolat àpres Ballet

Chocolat après ballet is a project made by the photographer and documentary filmmaker Mircea Sorin Albuțiuand in colaboration with Gici Albutiu. He photographed for 8 years, between 2012 and 2019, and contains images from the lives of the ballet dancers of the Cluj Opera.

The text of the book is written by Mihaela Vîrlan, lyric artist at the Romanian Opera, and the design and editing belong to Andrei Turenici. The book appeared in 2022 at the Blumenthal publishing house and was launched on April 27 at the Cluj Napoca National Opera.

Mihaela Vîrlan: "At the ballet shows, behind the scenes there is a constant noise like from the box of the race horses before entering the field, which comes from the breaths of the ballerinas, from the permanent training of the muscles, stretching, vaulting, jumping, you don't sit still behind the scenes, you move all the time, you warm up your muscles, you maintain your tone, you sweat, you breathe, you arch your legs, you repeat your movements, you look for the most expressive position, the safest, the one that doesn't - crack a bone, a vertebra, a ligament. There is another scene behind the scenes, hidden from view, but which communicates with the stage bathed in light. In the spotlight the ballerinas are bright, powerful, propelled into the air by a force that defies gravity, but as soon as they retreat backstage their body posture changes.

You see them lying on their vines with their heads in their hands, sweating, as if a violent storm had thrown them on a wet shore, the exertion bending them, kneeling them, receding into the positions of slaves in the galleys, where the work assumes Sisyphean proportions. You, the sweatless one, get a sense of futility looking at them, as if you were a barren woman looking at another woman giving birth. It's torment, it's the howling of flesh and blood that you see, but it's beautiful, uplifting, it's a call to life "in continued form", you feel that man is beautiful exactly where he is pressed by time, lying on the ground by decay and ruin, where he is considered weak, sinful, labile, subject to degradation, abandoned by time, by years, by God. In the body. And it's beautiful, above all. "

Mircea Sorin Albutiu (https://www.mirceaalbutiu.com/) is a photographer and author of documentary films, and his works have been exhibited in Azerbaijan, Montenegro, Romania and Portugal. Received film awards at SIMFEST and Moscow International Film Festival for Visual Anthropology.