In April, Cassandra Trenary appeared at Milan’s Les Étoiles gala with Vienna State Ballet principal Davide Dato, dancing the second-act pas de deux from Giselle and a duet from Marcelo Gomes’s Aftereffect. The performances marked one of her first major appearances since leaving American Ballet Theatre after fifteen years to join the Vienna State Ballet, a move that also brought renewed attention to the photographic practice she has developed alongside her dancing.

Writing for the Milan-based dance publication Gramilano, critic Graham Spicer praised the pair for preserving the dramatic core of both works. In Giselle, Trenary’s distant, spectral quality and Dato’s anguished partnering conveyed the ballet’s themes of betrayal, remorse and forgiveness; in Aftereffect, they gave Marcelo Gomes’s condensed duet a clear emotional progression rather than treating it as a technical showcase.

Onstage, Trenary inhabits roles shaped by choreography and viewed from the auditorium; in her photographs, she reverses that arrangement, photographing the dancers, herself, spaces, and a world that usually remains outside the frame.

Embodied, Trenary’s first solo exhibition at PRIV.Y Gallery last year, expanded from an initially planned forty photographs to around one hundred, as The Ballet Herald reported, gathering years of images of Trenary’s friends and colleagues at American Ballet Theatre. The resulting portraits of dancers and their interior lives made the exhibition more than a social record of a company and a particular period, as much as a magnification of the culture and life of ballet dancers behind the stage, performers that tend to shy away from typical entertainment culture.

In a recent interview with D la Repubblica, Trenary described photography as a way to stop existing only through the perspectives of choreographers, directors, and audiences, and to also employ herself on the other side of the fourth wall.

The photos also evade some of the tropes of ballet photography: exhaustion, pain and discipline, or overl-produced and over-stylized depictions. Trenary’s images feel very today, and for an art form that likely began in the 15th century, it is refreshing to see a return to the bare bones of any craft with a truly timeless boldness, free of pretense.