Near the beginning of an extended walk last November, I became transfixed by a tall flapping figure outside a bakery. I ended up taking over seventy pictures of the air dancer, and each one had a different pose. It was like receiving a free art class on the topic of gesture studies!
I marveled at the expressive range of this long tube of fabric with hollow arms, a winking face, and strips of black cloth for hair. As the tube man’s inner air pressure changed, various bends in his head, arms, and spine gave strong impressions of joy, fatigue, despair, sass, embarrassment, playfulness, surrender, triumph, and humour.
As I was working on this post, I managed to reduce the number of pictures by more than half, but I still need to ask viewers’ indulgence for the quantity of images posted here. (Sending a big thank you to Veronica Paloma for her thoughtful comments on these photos when I first posted them on Facebook last fall and for providing ideas for the titles “Bliss Float,” “Cheerleader,” and “Responding to the Latin Beat.”)
Leave a Reply