Writing a Letter: Akerman Ballet, Act 1

Six years in the making, Writing a Letter is Collier Schorr's translation of Chantal Akerman's 1974 film Je tu il elle into a ballet, and her argument that queer histories survive through adoration, adaptation and repetition.

Schorr directed the piece as a sequence of videotaped dances and cast herself in it, learning to dance for the work rather than staying behind the camera. Following Akerman's themes of transparency, sexuality, shame and love, the ballet questions the age, gender and racial norms that classical dance has historically enforced, telling a story about power, desire and compulsion. This first volume gathers 180 black-and-white film stills pulled from Act 1, printed at a hand-sized 5.5 × 7.5 inches across 240 pages, with an introduction by the performance scholar Peggy Phelan. Published by The Song Cave, it stands as a document of one artist working closely inside another's film.

Schorr (b. 1963, New York) studied at the School of Visual Arts and built a four-decade practice around portraiture that sits between document and fiction, most familiarly in Jens F., in which a German teenager restages Andrew Wyeth's Helga pictures, and in Neighbors/Nachbarn, 8 Women and Paul's Book. Her work was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial and is held by MoMA, the Whitney and the Walker Art Center; she has taught photography at Yale since 2003 and shoots regularly for fashion houses and magazines.