Ladies Take the Stage
Art and Burlesque
Photographer Jen Mellard shares these artistic images from Annie Cherry's recent Hurly Burly 2007 burlesque show.
Jen Mellard captures the graceful movements and the va-va-voom of these dancers through stylized imagery that emphasizes bold color and striking figures. These dancers represent women of various body shapes, sizes, and ages, exhibiting an intrinsic power that emanates from, but is not restricted to, the feminine form. What meets the eye is not a limitation for dull-thinking audiences, but a starting point to consider color, motion, and attitude that audiences of both genders savor for altogether different reasons.
Burlesque is the embodiment of women as creators of art and a manifestation of art itself. Burlesque entertains and titillates, but the choreographed acts suggest more than alluring moves on the stage. The burlesque entertainer is strong in mind, body, and spirit. She controls the expression and portrayal of her physical form through artistic performance and delivers not-so-subtle personal statements as well.
Mellard's images not only heighten the immediate explosion of motion and agility within the frame, but also charge the scene with vivid colors that evoke emotion, intangible and visceral as a distant wink, smile, and strut from the stage. There are still moments too, pauses filled with poise demonstrated by these proud women. Mellard contrasts color with the conscious use of darkness as negative space that enhances what the eye can see and what the imagination begins to conjure. Even now, the audience sits at a computer screen and observes much like the audience removed from the stage and shrouded in darkness. Watch the lights, the movements, and the art of burlesque as the ladies take the stage literally and figuratively.
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