Atlanta photographer J. Bakari Page turned his lens on the practice room and found the real story of what it takes to become a dancer.
The performances are easy to see. The recitals, the showcases, the stage, the moments families photograph, share and celebrate. What happens before all of that is rarely seen. The quiet but palpable pressure of a training session.
Page’s new photo book, “Any Given Saturday: The Art of Becoming, Vol. 01,” documents in black-and-white the pre-professional dance training program at AREA Atlanta, the performing arts organization and training center founded in 2009 by artistic director Jai McClendon Jones.
Page’s entry point into the project was personal. His daughter has trained at AREA since she was 3 years old.
“As a parent, you see the performances. You see the results,” Page said. “But the discipline, the pressure, the repetition all live inside the practice window.”
He started spending time inside that window. Not chasing images, he explained, but observing. Week after week, session after session, an idea of how to present what he saw took shape.
“At a certain point, it clicked that I wasn’t looking at isolated moments,” Page said. “I was looking at a system. A culture that was shaping these dancers long before they ever stepped on stage. That’s when the project shifted from something that could be a series into something that needed to be a book.”
What black and white makes possible
The photographs in “Any Given Saturday” are stark, precise and deliberately stripped of distraction. Page’s decision to shoot entirely in black and white is rooted in what he wanted viewers to actually see.
“Color would have pulled attention in too many directions,” he said. “The environment has color. The wardrobes have color. The space itself carries visual noise. Black and white removes that competition and puts the focus back on what actually matters. Form, light, gesture, and energy.”
The images show young dancers at the barre, mid-correction, mid-movement.Bodies caught between positions, between the instruction and the execution. Page describes his approach not as freezing motion but as translating it.
“I’m looking for structure inside motion. Not just action,” he said. “The goal isn’t to freeze dance. It’s to translate it into something that still feels alive, even when it’s still.”
Placing a camera in a room full of young people doing serious, focused work meant earning their trust first.
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“I wasn’t coming in for a single session. I was there repeatedly. Same space, same energy, same presence,” he said. “Trust builds when people realize you’re not there to take something from the space. You’re there to understand it.”
Atlanta-specific, universally legible
Page is a working creative professional and photographer based in Atlanta. His professional background includes time serving as creative director at Focus Brands and IMI Agency.
For Page, “Any Given Saturday” reflects a pivot from brand storytelling to something more intimate, a long-form documentary project built on proximity, patience and a father’s curiosity about the world his daughter inhabits.
Asked whether the book reads as an Atlanta story or something broader, Page said it is both.
“It’s very clearly rooted in Atlanta. The space, the people, the culture. That specificity matters,” he said. “But the themes are universal. Discipline. Growth. Repetition. Becoming. You don’t need to be a dancer, or from Atlanta, to understand what’s happening in the work.”
Vol. 01 is only the beginning
The subtitle of the book, “The Art of Becoming, Vol. 01,” signals that this is the opening chapter of a larger project. Page has mapped out four volumes in total, each advancing the subject in time and theme: discipline, performance, identity, and rediscovery.
“This first volume answers how it starts,” he said. “The next volumes will explore what it becomes.”
