Ten years, four continents, two apparently distant worlds: that of the great temples of classical dance — the Opéra de Paris, the Royal Ballet — and that of movement born on the street, in the neighborhoods of New York, São Paulo, Johannesburg. Matthew Brookes, a British photographer best known for his portraits of Hollywood cinema, spent a decade building a visual archive that does not divide these two worlds, but sets them in dialogue. The result is Expression of Freedom: Through the World of Dance, published by Damiani Books with a preface by Sir Ben Okri — a volume that brings together ten years of photographic research on dance as a social, cultural, and political practice.

The book is not a celebration of dance as a discipline. It is something more subtle: an inquiry into movement as a form of presence in the world. Brookes photographs étoiles and street dancers with the same visual language, the same distance, the same attention. There is no exoticism in one, nor reverence in the other. There is instead a precise choice: to remove the hierarchy between codified gesture and vernacular movement, between the trained body and the body that simply expresses itself. «Brookes shifts dance from the stage to the city, from ritual to lived space — and in doing so redraws the coordinates of the body as a political act».

What stands out is the choice of settings: almost never a traditional stage. His subjects move through urban spaces, everyday contexts, places that by convention do not belong to dance. This compositional decision carries a precise implication: dance is not reserved spectacle, it is social, spatial, embodied practice.

The project opens a reflection on the visibility of the body, on authorship, and on how different cultures inhabit movement. The images do not resolve these tensions — they hold them open, deliberately. And therein lies their strength: in being instruments of question rather than answer. A volume that speaks of dance but says many other things.

ph. © Matthew Brookes — courtesy of and published by Damiani Books

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