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Every letter begins with an impossible premise: that a collection of words, arranged carefully enough, might bridge the distance between bodies. Artist and filmmaker Chantal Akerman understood this when she made Je Tu Il Elle in 1974, opening her first feature with its protagonist Julie—played by Akerman herself—alone in an apartment, writing and rewriting a letter to the woman she left.
She shuffles furniture from room to room as if trying to exhaust herself, absently eating spoonfuls of sugar from a paper bag, and sitting with the unbearable quiet of heartbreak. Eventually, she hitchhikes across Belgium and arrives at her former lover’s apartment, where the two women make love. By morning, she is gone again. Of course, the letter is never really the point. It is a vessel, a way of extending oneself toward someone no longer within reach.
More than 40 years later, photographer Collier Schorr returns to that gesture in Writing a Letter: Akerman Ballet, Act 1, the first volume of an ongoing project documenting the artist’s adaptation of Akerman’s film into a ballet. Published by The Song Cave on July 19 with an introduction by performance theorist Peggy Phelan, the book gathers iPhone stills from seven years of rehearsals in which Schorr dances alongside a rotating cast of collaborators. Like Akerman before her, she places her own body inside the work, revisiting the film’s questions of desire, intimacy, performance, and power through another medium.
Schorr wanted the collection to feel like a chapbook, “a meditation on this one idea of writing a letter,” she says—imbued with “the energy, narcissism, and performance of a love letter.” She dances alone, with printouts of scenes from Akerman’s film, and with others; she undresses, falls, and glides imperfectly across the floorboards. Across the pages, each still holds Schorr between movement and rest, preserving the action while reminding us that it has already passed. Even the title suspends the project inside an unfinished action. It is Writing a Letter, not A Letter to Akerman, as if to suggest that the words have yet to reach the end of the page.
The New York City-born photographer—whose fine art and editorial photographs have appeared everywhere from museums to magazines, including this one—first encountered Je Tu Il Elle in the early 1980s, when she was still writing art criticism and only beginning to make pictures. She could often be found watching movies while smoking cigarettes at the back of the St. Marks Cinema. She recalls seeing Akerman’s film at the Quad, and being struck by its stillness, repetition, and unapologetic lesbian desire. In an exchange with Phelan that opens the book, Schorr says that it was the first time she saw two women have sex, as well as the first time she saw work by a lesbian artist.
What stayed with her most was Akerman’s awkwardness: the way she dragged a mattress across the floor, inhabited silence, and refused to make either her body or Julie’s desire appear graceful for the camera. Akerman allowed hesitation and discomfort to remain visible, finally offering Schorr a body onscreen that moved like her own.
Those scenes settled beneath the surface until roughly a decade ago, when Schorr found herself drawn toward performing alongside her photographic subjects. Returning to Je Tu Il Elle, she recognized Akerman as both director and performer, subject and image-maker. The film, she realized, had always been a dance.
And so, in 2019, at 55, after decades spent behind the camera, Schorr entered a dance studio for the first time, approaching the unfamiliar medium the way she had once approached art criticism. “I never researched,” she tells me on a video call from her apartment in New York. “I always just wanted to know what I thought about a thing.” Rather than study technique or immerse herself in performance history, she learned through rehearsal, trusting what the music produced in her body. Alongside eight collaborators, she began translating Je Tu Il Elle scene by scene into choreography, using printouts from Akerman’s film as the skeleton for each rehearsal. Without years of codified movement to fall back on, “all the rules were gone,” opening unexpected possibilities for everyone in the room.
“I was this mysterious partner,” Schorr says. “All the dancers had a sense of what might happen if they did A or B. With me, they didn’t quite know what I would do.”
Dance unsettled the relationship Schorr had spent decades cultivating through photography. Across portraits of wrestlers, soldiers, adolescents, artists, and models, she has examined how bodies are shaped by gender, desire, fantasy, and the knowledge that they are being watched. Yet she has largely remained outside those images, directing from behind the lens while disappearing from the frame herself.
“It has always been about shadowing and permeating for me,” she explains. “One moment, I’m far away, but then I look through the lens and I’m close—as if I’m entering the person, and them into me.”
This proximity carries both desire and danger for the artist. “People have such mixed feelings about having their picture taken,” Schorr says. “There’s the fear of being seen, the fear of not being seen, the fear of someone getting too close, the fear of not being loved.” But she resists the familiar idea of the camera as an instrument of theft. “It’s not soul stealing,” she says. “It’s wanting someone to literally open a door that you can walk through.”
In the dance studio, the door opened in both directions. Schorr no longer issued instructions from behind a camera or monitor; she directed with her hands. “If I wanted someone to come closer, I would pull them closer,” she says. “If I wanted to turn someone’s head, I would turn it.” While each dance remained directed by Schorr, authorship became physical and reciprocal. Each partner acted like a co-choreographer, able to alter the temperature of a gesture, resist her weight, or guide her elsewhere.
Schorr also learned that almost all dance is made with a sense of a “front”: dancers are trained to orient themselves toward an invisible audience, even when they appear not to be looking at one. But Akerman Ballet was never made for a theater. Considering the rehearsals were recorded on iPhones mounted to tripods, the dances unfold without an audience to play to; the camera, Schorr says, almost announces that no one is there. With no crowd awaiting acknowledgment, the dancers’ attention returns to their partners. For Schorr, that absence produced perhaps the greatest lesson: “how to dare to look at the person you’re dancing with.”
The footage then returned Schorr’s gaze to herself. “In the frame, I become this realized character,” she says. But that character does not reveal some unguarded, authentic self. “There is no sense that I am the real me in these works.” As in her photography, identity appears through pose, gesture, framing, and repetition. This time, however, Schorr is subject to the same transformation she has long produced in the people before her camera.
Again, she finds herself thinking about Akerman, who cast herself because she believed a trained actress would be too graceful to embody Julie’s necessary clumsiness. In Akerman’s awkwardness, Schorr found permission to trust her own untrained body—to be, as she puts it, both “clumsy and in control.” Schorr also sees her appearance in the work as part of a broader lineage. Not just Akerman, but also Ana Mendieta, Carolee Schneemann, Yvonne Rainer, Adrian Piper, and Barbara Hammer were among the artists who gave her permission to place her own body inside an image. “There’s just much less lesbian portraiture in art that gets out into the world,” she says.
Now 62, Schorr is no longer dancing as she did when she first began the project. During a later rehearsal with Maria, a dancer she imagined as Julie’s former lover, she arranged her printouts of Akerman’s film across the floor in the shape of a bed and the two danced across them. Roughly 20 minutes later, Schorr broke her foot. “A dancer’s fracture,” she says, amused by the irony.
It’s caused her to reconsider her place in the project’s eventual live performance: “I’m curious about how to perform as the director,” she says, “to train someone to dance unprofessionally, like me.”
