Carucci started documenting the events in which she performed with a 35mm camera. She photographed the communities, the other dancers and herself before and after the show. In order to capture the atmosphere of festivity and convey the sense of spacious banquet halls filled with celebrators, however, she needed a panoramic camera. To document her performance Carucci was aided by her partner, Eran. “Some of the photographs in the series are collaborative efforts, some are practically his own point of view, his works,” she says.
Carucci lives and works in New York, far away from her family. She performs at family celebrations of Americans, Greeks, Indians, Uzbeks, Turks, Chinese, and Gypsies. She has performed for celebrities in posh restaurants, and has danced in tacky bars, in apartment cellars and at middle-class family celebrations. The series offers glimpses into a journey. Since in most instances Carucci was the “surprise” of the event, the photographic act took a short, fixed time, from the moment she waited backstage for her cue until the moment in which the performance ended and she was rushing off to the next.
In this series Carucci continues her preoccupation with intimacy. Surrounded by entire families, grandparents and children, by the smell of newly-served food and the hubbub of merry family occasions, she is at the center of the guest jumble – as a compensation of sorts for the intensity of family gatherings which she misses in her private life.
Edited like a cinematic sequence of a typical night, the series conveys the addictive nature of the performance: being at the center of attention, kneading the audience’s feelings with every pelvic movement. While performing a sensuous, seductive, direct, sexual, warm, lively, sweaty dance, with the audience and in their midst, the dancer must preserve its beauty and grace, and display an elaborate technique and choreographic sophistication.
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