Ballet asks impossible things of its dancers. It rewards certainty and precision onstage while demanding an almost unbearable tolerance for uncertainty off stage. Careers are finite. Bodies change. The role you’ve spent years dreaming about belongs to another girl until, suddenly, it belongs to you. Then, just as suddenly, it belongs to another, without rhyme or reason or often explanation.

Cassandra’s photographs feel as inseparable from dance as they do from that interim space. They are not photographs of ballet so much as photographs of what ballet feels like. Unlike dance photographers such as Martha Swope or Arthur Elgort, who immortalized virtuosity—the perfect arabesque, the Italian fouette turn frozen at its apex—Cassandra is drawn to the whispered intimacies surrounding performance: the empty stage viewed from above before the dancers take their places, the audience eagerly waiting for Swan Lake to begin. Topless ballerinas sit in their thongs, pointe shoes crammed into the radiator behind them. Mirrors reflect half-costumed bodies caught between private selves and public ones. Like Degas, she captures the secret, magical world backstage before the dancer becomes the character. The dancer is still the dancer. A person. A person who depends on other people; who, half the time, can tolerate the harshness of the job thanks to those people.

These are photographs of waiting rooms and thresholds. They convey a longing for past and present relationships even as they linger in what John Keats called negative capability: the artist’s willingness to remain inside uncertainty. The show takes its title Consider Dwelling Here Too Long from an article written by Melissa Kirsch about the uneasy human work of finding comfort in a constant state of liminality. Cassandra’s photographs seem to ask whether that discomfort is where the better part of life actually occurs.

Looking through these images, I found myself nostalgic, thinking of myself as a child, a baby ballerina in a largely pre-internet world, desperate for images like these to let me in on the secret lives of the pros who I obsessed over. That return to a childlike creative longing is so hard to retain into adulthood, so difficult to recultivate years later—something this artist is clearly prioritizing. Her photos are haunted by questions many of us avoid. Who are we after the role ends? Which identity have we chosen, and is it the correct one? What happens to the world we leave behind when a body inevitably assumes a new and different shape? Can truly intimate moments be performed, or can they only be captured?

The camera gives Cassandra permission to linger inside those questions. Not all ballerinas are willing to take on this line of inquisition, just as they are not all able to push themselves towards true artistic greatness, which requires a fearless envisioning and re-envisioning of their own future as they enter different phases of their career. There is thus a knowing tenderness in Cassandra’s gaze, but never sentimentality. Loneliness without self-pity. The images collapse memories into present events, suggesting that we permanently carry former versions of ourselves in our muscle memory, ready to schlep them with us onto the stage when the maestro steps into the orchestra pit.

Perhaps this is what I admire most about these pictures. They ask us to pay attention to the moments we overlook— the soft intake of breath just after the lights go dark and the curtain rises, an interrupted phone call with our mothers, the empty stage viewed from the wings. Her photographs remind us that narrative happens quietly, intimately, between performances, while no one except Cassandra is watching.

— Sarah Hoover July, 2026