Mrs Cohen’s Basement

My daughter, Olivia went to the local ballet school, Nancy Cohen Ballet. Mrs Cohen held classes in her NY basement for nearly forty years. Everyone in town had someone in the family who had been there. The world of ballet is wrapped in nostalgia for me, and I danced up until my early adulthood. I would regularly ask Mrs Cohen if I could stay to photograph her class -not just for my daughter, or my own childhood longings, but because she created something so rare and magical, in the most modest of places. Her students hardly learnt a step, and even if they could jeté there wasn’t enough room to. They disappeared into story, gesture, character, and costume, ending each week in a pile of colourful tulle. Before her reluctant retirement in 2019, we all took to the woods to recreate the classical worlds she had bespelled in their heads.