14 DAY TRIAL // For today’s Viral of the Day, I propose a video that’s both tense and terrifyingly beautiful. It’s actually an extract from a short film by Javier Perez, called “En puntas,” which roughly translates as “On Tiptoe.”
The film sees a ballerina put on her pointe shoes. However, hers are a bit more special because they’re extended with long kitchen knives, on which she must find balance.
The ballerina is shown struggling to dance on the lid of a piano. She’s hesitant at first, frustrated afterwards and, in the end, violent but successful.
“The ballerina appears as an eerie figure expressing effort, sacrifice and pain in her strive for perfection. Both fragile and cruel,” reads a description of the video, pointing that, at the end of the video, her steps “scrap and cut into the delicate surface of the piano.”
With this image, Perez “reveals the weaknesses that become the boundaries between seemingly irreconcilable concepts such as: beauty and cruelty, fragility and violence, culture and nature or life and death,” the description continues.
That final image of the ballerina overcoming every obstacle and standing triumphant on the ruined piano is certainly one that stays with you even after the video is over.