Digital Spotlight

Wall of Bows

Digital Spotlight

Wall of Bows

This gallery features a collection of multiple years of ‘page bows’ all taken during American Ballet Theatre’s annual spring season at the Metropolitan Opera House. These “page bows” were captured during dress rehearsals, performances, galas and special retirement performances. The subjects and year taken are identified, but you get to guess the roles and productions.

“The curtain call is an odd moment in many ways. Actors, who have often spent the last few hours pretending that the audience simply weren’t there, now come forward, smiling and laughing, to acknowledge their presence. The Irish dramatist and critic Dion Boucicault wrote in 1889 of the “small space” in front of the curtain which belongs to both the stage and the auditorium (a word, interestingly, which he claims to have invented), and in which the actors appear somewhere in between their lives on the stage as characters and their lives in the world as real people.”

Sophie Nield
April 3, 2012
theguardian.com