Breathtaking Portraits Capture Ballet's Finest Dancing on the Streets of New York
Source: My Modern Met
In an interview with Huffington Post, he explains, “Like mime theater, photography [is] an amazing nonverbal communication medium…Yet it allowed [me] to capture fleeting emotions and tell a story for a much longer time than mime theater could.” In his stirring visual tales, ballerinas and ballerinos make the perfect protagonists. As he describes, “Ballet dancers make us feel as if their movements were truly effortless. This while pushing their bodies to the very extreme of what is humanly possible. It is that grace and elegance which mesmerizes us.”
He works with dancers from the American Ballet Theatre, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Ballet Concierto De Puerto Rico, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, and more, and their paused movements are indeed mesmerizing, particularly when paired with Robles’ selections of surroundings. The men and women twist and twirl with elegance, encumbered by neither the city hubbub nor the harshest of natural elements. He’s taken many of the portraits during pounding rainstorms, for example, with the dazzling drops swirling around long legs and arms like glitter; otherwise, he tends to seek sensational lighting conditions, whether using the beams of cars to create technicolor backgrounds, sourcing slices of heavy shadow in dim alleyways, or backlighting his subjects in the glow of the setting sun.
The continuously developing collection is stunning in its vibrant variety, rendering theatrics from ordinary sidewalks. This juxtaposition between ballet dancer and urban backdrop is all a part of Robles’ vision: “to break the norm of the everyday, to shatter the monotony of our way of life and portray a world where we could move without the stiff rules of etiquette. To capture the idea of weightlessness, or hovering around town.”
More: http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/omar-robles-ozrdance
(For some reason, I couldn't post some of my favorite pics)
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His work is breathtaking... I really enjoy the juxtaposition of his photographs. I posted another OP before regarding his work featuring dancers in Cuba:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10027762338
Such beautiful photos. 
I can't figure out what's going on in the 3rd photo from the top – the man jumping. It looks like a reflection in water behind him, but it doesn't stop at a horizon line...
Let me know if you figure it out. Lol! 
makes more sense than him jumping in front of a vertical pond.
the man looks so tiny by comparison. Or maybe it just looks odd to my brain...
Carl Milles' Europa and the Bull (1924), in Stockholm.
What a combination. 
.... when's the last time you went to a ballet? .... that wasn't "Nutcracker"? 
Support these amazing artists and go to the ballet! Often!
BTW... there's a great DVD of NYCB dancers doing Jerome Robbins' "NY Export: Opus Jazz"... a ballet he did about the same time as "West Side Story". The young cast dance the episodes in locations around NYC. (The pas de deux on the abandoned elevated train track at sunrise....in the rain...is amazing!).
Oh look...here's a trailer with excerpts from the Pas de deus.
The original (in 1956? 57?) was ignored in the US until it toured Europe...which ate it up and loved it...and came back, where they did a section of it on Ed Sullivan. It became hugely successful.
Here's the trailer from their web site.
http://opusjazz.com/trailer
