Film stills from the first act of Collier’s ballet-homage to Chantal Akerman’s Je tu il elle
For many years, American photographer Collier Schorr (born 1963) has been creating a ballet inspired by Chantal Akerman’s film Je tu il elle. Following the film’s themes of transparency, sexuality, shame and love, Schorr has directed a piece consisting of videotaped dances in which she includes herself as a character alongside her fellow dancers. At once intimate and risky, questioning aspects of age, gender and racial norms historically underrepresented in ballet, Schorr tells a story about power, desire and compulsion. In Writing a Letter, Akerman Ballet, Act 1, Schorr has pulled a large collection of film stills from the first act of this ballet. Published as a standalone document of one artist vigorously in conversation with another’s work, it is also an example of the way queer histories can be shared and cared for through adoration, adaptation and repetition.
Sunday, July 19, starting with a book signing at at 6:45 PM, Metrograph NYC presents author and photographer Collier Schorr for a special screening to accompany the publication of Writing a Letter: Akerman Ballet, Act 1, a document of Schorr’s work on a ballet inspired by Chantal Akerman’s Je tu il elle, which will be on sale in the lobby along with Akerman’s rapturously received, newly reprinted memoir, My Mother Laughs, also published by The Song Cave. The screening of Je tu il elle at 7:30 PM will be preceded by Schorr’s short film Scene 25, Heads to Camera Kissing (2022). continue to blog
“I first saw Chantal Akerman’s film Je tu il elle in the early 1980s. It was the first time I saw two women having sex. It was the first time I saw a lesbian artist. I forgot about it until ten years ago when I started feeling the urge to perform with my subjects. Those impulses brought me back to Akerman, who was both a director and an object of her work. What I saw 40 years later was that the film was a dance. [. . .] I had always felt that female artists who inhabited their work were beautiful and female-presenting and that I was forever locked out of being able to exist as a spectacle. Akerman’s body, unlike an actress’, was awkward and performative, vulnerable and powerful in its ordinariness.” So essayist Peggy Phelan quotes photographer and now choreographer and dancer Collier Schorr in Writing a Letter: Akerman Ballet, Act 1, in which Schorr documents her exploration of Akerman’s game-changing 1974 film. Out now from The Song Cave, it features 180 black-and-white images by Schorr, as in this collection translating the third movement, Sugar Duet. continue to blog
FORMAT: Pbk, 5.5 x 7.5 in. / 240 pgs / 180 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $29.95 LIST PRICE: CANADA $41.95 GBP £24.99 ISBN: 9798993181127 PUBLISHER: The Song Cave AVAILABLE: 8/11/2026 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: WORLD
Collier Schorr: Writing a Letter Akerman Ballet, Act 1
Published by The Song Cave. Introduction by Peggy Phelan.
Film stills from the first act of Collier’s ballet-homage to Chantal Akerman’s Je tu il elle
For many years, American photographer Collier Schorr (born 1963) has been creating a ballet inspired by Chantal Akerman’s film Je tu il elle. Following the film’s themes of transparency, sexuality, shame and love, Schorr has directed a piece consisting of videotaped dances in which she includes herself as a character alongside her fellow dancers.
At once intimate and risky, questioning aspects of age, gender and racial norms historically underrepresented in ballet, Schorr tells a story about power, desire and compulsion. In Writing a Letter, Akerman Ballet, Act 1, Schorr has pulled a large collection of film stills from the first act of this ballet. Published as a standalone document of one artist vigorously in conversation with another’s work, it is also an example of the way queer histories can be shared and cared for through adoration, adaptation and repetition.
