Writing A Letter, Akerman Ballet Act 1 by Collier Schorr

*Coming soon! Presale begins in Summer 2026, or you can order the 2026 subscription now.*

For many years, Collier Schorr 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. “Akerman played herself in Je, tu, il, elle,” she says, “because she knew no actress could be as awkward as she was. I feel the same.”
Incredibly intimate, risky, and questioning aspects of age, gender, and racial norms historically underrepresented in ballet, Schorr wanted “to tell another story, based on the ones that Chantal Akerman had told me, about power and desire and compulsion and essentially free speech in the male-dominated field...” 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 stand-alone 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. A heady act of love, in itself.

*We will also be rereleasing our edition of Chantal Akerman’s memoir, My Mother Laughs, in concert with the release of Collier Schorr’s book.*

As part of the New York art world of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Collier Schorr’s early work mined the vernacular of postmodernism to create photographs that toe the line between documentary and fiction. Often using her subjects allegorically, Schorr’s work navigates the auspices of identity politics to ask beguiling questions about the nomenclature of selfhood. Her range of imagery: from atmospheric portraiture to hard glamour has been used in advertising campaigns for Louis Vuitton, Saint Laurent Paris, Comme Des Garcons, Hermes, and Bottega Veneta, to name a few. Ms. Schorr has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe and is represented by 303 Gallery in New York and Modern Art in London. Ms. Schorr’s work is also represented in many public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Jewish Museum, and the The Walker Art Center. As a consistent writer and art critic, her essays have also appeared in various museum catalogs and magazines. In the last few years Ms. Schorr undertook to adapt Chantal Akerman’s seminal and personal film Je, tu, il, ellle into a full length dance piece made specifically to be captured by video and published as a movement script. Ms. Schorr was appointed to the Yale faculty in 2003 and is currently senior critic in photography.