PASSÉ, Brad Walls’ latest work, arrived with the promise of “a three-year process culminating in a striking immersive exhibition featuring imagery from one of the largest choreographed ballet photoshoots ever staged.”
There’s something innately compelling about large-scale human formations — the way individuality dissolves into collective shape. Artists like Spencer Tunick and Vanessa Beecroft have explored this idea, staging works where individual bodies merge into something far greater than themselves. Walls taps into a similar fascination, but through ballet’s language of symmetry and angles.
On September 11, his sweeping vision — 60 dancers and a football-field-sized stage adorned in red carpet — was distilled into eight photographs, presented at a pop-up gallery on Broome Street.
And so the question emerges: how do you bring massive, bold art to viewers so they feel its presence up close?
Color
The answer begins the moment you step into the gallery.
At the entrance, The Big One — a photograph of dancers arranged in three concentric circles — greets you, surrounded by walls and carpet in the same deep red as in the photo shoot. It feels almost like stepping inside one of the images themselves, a gesture that blurs the line between observer and participant.
Inside, dancers move among the crowd, mingling with you on the same crimson carpet. Their presence reinforces the sense of being inside the work itself.
Vastness vs. Individuality
In this immersive space, the photographs shift your focus from the sweeping grandeur of a football-field performance to details only visible up close.
When I spoke with Walls about the series, he described his fascination with geometry from afar and the idiosyncrasies of the dancers up close, pointing to subtle variations — the angle of an arm, a fleeting expression, a flexed foot — that show the uniqueness of each dancer within the symmetry. This comes through most vividly in Dead Juliet, a favorite of both the dancers and myself. The image scatters dancers across the floor like figures resting in different ballet poses, celebrating their quirks.
While the details draw you in, the sheer magnitude of the photoshoot doesn’t fully carry through. The vertical lighting minimizes shadows, giving the images a crisp, orderly look — but also flattening their sense of depth and scale. I found myself waiting for the physical jolt of awe, the sensation of being dwarfed by what’s before you.
Motion vs. Stillness
If intimacy changes how you experience scale, stillness reshapes how you experience ballet.
Ballet is ephemeral: a leap exists only for a heartbeat before it disappears. In live performances like Swan Lake, motion is the essence — dancers moving in perfect harmony, their fleeting jumps dissolving almost as quickly as they appear. Photography, by contrast, freezes that moment, memorializing what the stage cannot.
In PASSÉ, Walls favors still, carefully arranged formations over captured movement. His compositions focus on floor-based, geometric formations, turning dancers into elements of design rather than bodies in motion. From a distance, the dancers read like living sculptures — most memorably in Backbone, where the dancers form a single, structural spine across the red field. This approach shifts the experience of ballet itself, inviting viewers to study structure and symmetry instead of being swept up by its ephemerality.
Walls bring grandeur close not by recreating the scale of the original shoot, but by transforming it. Up close, the vast formations resolve into individual dancers — their expressions and their poses. It’s a shift in perspective, from the collective to the personal.