112 pages Edited by Fabienne Pavia and Céline Queric Text(s) by Ariel Kenig Photographs by Bruno Cordonnier 31.1 x 22 cm Language: English, French Hardback Publisher: Le Bec en l’air 2025
Between 1986 and 1994, Paris danced. In its nightclubs and after-hours temples, the Palace, Les Bains Douches, bodies met, collided, and burned with freedom. Photographer Bruno Cordonnier, working nights as a printer in a Parisian photo lab, captured the pulse of that world in black and white: a city in motion, luminous and fragile, suspended between euphoria and loss.
Revisited decades later, his archive reveals the essence of a generation, artists, drag queens, lovers, outsiders, united under strobe lights and disco balls, just as the specter of AIDS began to darken the dance floor. Cordonnier’s camera moves close to the body, tracing gestures of seduction, defiance, and joy; his images form a vivid portrait of social and sexual liberation before the fall.
With a text by Ariel Kenig, Danser Paris is both a tribute and a transmission: a journey through the nights that shaped an era, where dance became a language of resistance and a celebration of life itself.
