seeing dance in the city
Béatrice Coron silhouettes and cut-ups
January 6, 2011
A new MTA banner greets New York City straphangers — a paper-thin slice of a subway tunelling through a complex network of abundant City life, against a piquant rush-hour sky. Béatrice Coron cut the scene from a single sheet of black.
Straphangers may have noticed that for Coron, the city is full of dance. The artist runs 6 miles a day and likes to look at the activity, including tango, along her route through Central Park.
Twenty years ago, she took African dance classes with Bernadine Jennings in Harlem. To this day, she sends drawings to Jennings, editor of Attitude: A Dancer's Magazine. The art is a unique feature. The magazine built a stock of Coron's small drawings of generic ballerinas, whirling dervishes, African drummers and dancers, and more. 
Coron’s first language is French, she was born and raised in France, and came to the US in 1984. She also speaks Spanish, having lived in Mexico for one year. The collection of dictionaries on her studio bookshelf includes one of special interest to her, comprising words that are the same in the three languages. Books are not only an inspiration, but also her art form. The major museums and libraries in the US and France own her limited edition, hand-made books. 
Coron uses words and proverbs in her book works, at best, she writes complicated language poetry, with her iconic silhouette illustrations as relief from the wordplay. She offers the French word raccourci (a shortcut) for her method of combining different ideas together.
Prayer for the Unfaithful is one of the books Coron calls visible literature. It is a folded fortune that expands like a lantern, with homemade proverbs. "There's always a twist somewhere." A coin dangles at the bottom of this talisman.
Top image: detail of Perspectives. Above: Two views of Let's Dance. Below: Jazz Man (8' height).
In Visibility and Truth, small, stenciled figures obliquely illustrate text. As I turned the pages in Coron’s studio, she explained the jagged words as "half-truth with double meaning." It captivates like a puzzle.
Perspectives on Shakespeare is a tabletop sheet metal book, coated with matte black. Magnetic, moveable proverbs from the bard articulate the basic, folded shape with its many cutout windows and interiors that occur on the same plane.
Although larger pieces create more of a challenge for Coron, she has been building a healthy career of public commissions. She adapts her creations for ironwork fences, garments, murals, and more. She often puts in 12-hour days in her upper west side studio. The picture window faces an uptown vista of Manhattan Avenue flanked by low apartment buildings. Many would envy the even, north light.
Coron’s process is sculptural and unforgiving even when the material is TYVEK (also used for FEDEX envelopes). "Like pouring from one container to another and repeat," she goes between the actual physical piece, pencil drawings, and her iMac. At each stage, she refines. For the South Bronx developer Les Bluestone she is cutting eight-foot male and female dancing figures that recall Morrisania’s jazz heritage. Club 845, Blue Morocco, Freddy’s, Boston Road Ballroom, and Hunts Point Palace were neighborhood haunts for Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, and dancers.
Coron returns often to Danse Macabre and El Día de los Muertos themes, recalling her native identity. She draws skeletons. Lively as all her figures, they twist and kick within rigid frameworks, moving with surprising fluidly and musicality. (Her series of “Deadbeats” wear iPods). In the age-old traditions, they pay homage to life's brevity and tell us to live in the moment.
“Everything I do is a silhouette of a balance. You can see what will happen before and what will happen after.” Her network of twisting torsos, lifted and pointed feet, encircling arms, and loopy armitures have a quality of sweetness and fun. If we suspend disbelief, they conjure notions of dance, love, and freedom.