Dorothy River
Yearnings of the Soul
Dancers of thread and light, born from life on stage. They float, they turn, they listen to the air.
About the Artist
Before there was Dorothy River, there was Aelita West: drama actress, mime and clown, a woman who has spent her life telling stories with her body. For more than 25 years she has been part of Slava Polunin’s Snow Show, a world-famous fairy tale performed without words, under a blizzard of white.
In recent years the stage has followed her into the studio. The gesture, the pause, the slight tilt of a head — everything a mime knows by heart — now lives in her paintings and sculptures. Under the name Dorothy River, she has found a second voice. On stage, Aelita West plays the roles. In the studio, she lets her figures perform.
Her sculptures are made from the very white spiderweb that became the signature of the Snow Show. What was once a stage prop, in her hands, becomes a material with a soul: fragile yet resilient, it does not hide the light but holds it.
Yearnings of the Soul
They hang in the air like a held breath: ballerinas spun from white thread, so light they seem to have forgotten gravity. Suspended on invisible strands, they answer the faintest stir of air, and their silent performance never ends.
Each figure is an emotion caught in flight, a dancer frozen at the height of her leap. The webbing does not block the light; it gathers it. The ballerinas turn translucent, and their shadows drift across the walls as if they were woven from memories, from dreams, from the breath of air itself.
This is a theater where the air is the director. Not a word is spoken. The story lives in a slight tilt of the head, in the flutter of a tutu touched by a ray of sun. Any room they enter — a gallery, a lobby, a window — becomes a stage, and the viewer is drawn into quiet contemplation.
The ballerinas are yearning souls, light and fragile, longing to soar. Their white threads trace the thin line between being and non-being, the ties that bind us to the world, the passage from one state to another. And in their delicate yet resilient forms lives the quiet strength of the spirit, searching for balance and freedom in a world that never stands still.
The Tree & The White Wanderers
Part fairy tale, part parable: a white tree and a family of horses, gathered in one quiet, mythical world.
The Tree rises from the same white webbing that once drifted across the Snow Show stage. Its branches spread wide and reach toward the light, forming an invisible dome of shelter. It is a tree of memory and of home, and in it the old magic of the theater is born again, as nature and art are always born again.
Beneath its branches stand the White Wanderers: a stately horse and its foals, their long manes of thread flowing like water. They carry something ancient, almost totemic. They are pure, unfettered thought; they are the journey; they are the tenderness of a family that stays close.
From threads that once fell on a stage, a tree has grown, and horses have come to life. So it is with us: we gather what the past has left us, honor it, and grow from it something luminous and lasting.
Get in touch
For exhibitions, commissions, and press,
please get in touch.
- studio@dorothyriver.art
- Phone
- +1 (347) 688-2327
- Studio
- New York, NY