For a generation of ballerinas, Wendy Whelan was a walking goddess. The former New York City Ballet principal dancer joined the company at 17, and was quickly singled out for promotion and praise. She served as a muse for multiple then-up-and-coming choreographers and would go on to have more new ballets made for her than any other dancer in the company’s history. She became the defining American ballerina of her generation.

All the while, she says in a new documentary, she was asking herself, “What the fuck is it going to be like when I can’t do this any more?”

In 2013, she found out.

At the time, Whelan was 46 years old, which is all but ancient by ballerina standards. Ballet is so punishing on the body, and the standard demanded by top companies so high, that most women peak by their 30th birthdays and retire not long after. When Misty Copeland was promoted to the top rank of American Ballet Theater in 2015, it was a bittersweet moment: she’d been promoted at last, but at the age of 32, she probably didn’t have many dancing years left in her. Whelan, whose professional ballet career lasted three decades, was truly an anomaly, a ballet institution who outlasted some of her younger colleagues by years.

By 46, she noticed that she was being cast in fewer ballets, including, to her chagrin, the iconic Nutcracker, in which she’d been dancing the role of the Sugarplum Fairy for years. Her boss, Ballet Master Peter Martins, hinted that it might be time for her to move on. And then, her hip started hurting.

The documentary “Wendy Whelan: Restless Creature” finds Whelan preparing for surgery to repair a labral tear, which has made even walking across the stage an agony. She travels to Vail, Colorado, and puts herself in the hands of one of the world’s best hip surgeons, whose walls are covered in the jerseys of the pro athletes he’s treated. This is the man people see when they need to get back in the game, she explains. She needs to do just that, she says, especially since “I don’t have a ton of time left at my game.”

”Restless Creature” shows us Whelan’s recovery from the surgery (after first showing us the surgery itself, in rather gruesome detail), and her return to New York to contemplate what comes after ballet. She gets off crutches, returns to the ballet studio and begins to branch out into contemporary dance, hoping that it will be less brutal on her body. But it soon becomes clear that her body can’t take a return to ballet in addition to her ambitious plan to create a contemporary dance program and tour it all over the country. She has to focus on ballet for what little time she has left before retirement becomes inevitable.

Throughout the film, Whelan consults her former colleagues, all of whom have already retired. She asks them: How did you do this? How did you walk away from the only job you’ve ever had, the thing you’ve been working toward almost since you could walk? Who are you when you’re a ballerina who can’t do ballet any more?

Career paths out of ballet are notoriously narrow. Dancers usually skip college, and even the end of high school, to devote themselves to dancing in their late teens and early 20s, which means that when they retire from dancing, they’re out in the job market without an entry-level degree. Some dancers go on to teach or coach, and some to choreograph, though the latter path is often even less stable, predictable or lucrative than being a dancer. Some go into ballet-adjacent work, like dance photography. Some will be picked to run companies; Pacific Northwest Ballet, Miami City Ballet, Washington Ballet and Pennsylvania Ballet are all run by alumni of the New York City Ballet or American Ballet Theater. But there are only so many ballet companies to run, and turnover at the top can be infrequent.

Besides, as Whelan explains in the film, she hadn’t made a plan for her post-ballet life; while some of her colleagues were setting themselves up for the next step, she was busy just … dancing.

At its core, “Restless Creature” is a film about grief. We watch as Whelan comes to the realization that her career is ending; that she’ll soon lose the structure of morning class and rehearsal and performance that have defined her days for decades; that she’ll leave behind a large piece of herself, and her identity, when she leaves the Lincoln Center stage for the last time. She moves through the stages of grieving, showing the camera very little anger, and the film ends with her farewell performance in October 2014, which featured yet more new works made just for her.

Now, she’s “really close to the end” of that grieving process, she told HuffPost in a phone interview. She didn’t go to the ballet for a while after she retired, but, she says, now she can go “and not feel pangs in the same way. I’m really happy about that. I can watch works that were made for me and feel a separation, and I’m really glad about that.”

She’s still performing. Her collaboration with the cadre of contemporary choreographers she assembled at the end of her time at City Ballet has toured around the country, and she opened the Joyce Theater’s spring season this year. She’s started coaching other dancers, and recently set a piece by Alexei Ratmansky with Pacific Northwest Ballet — meaning, she learned every step and movement of the ballet and then taught them all to the dancers at that company.

In her new life as a contemporary dancer, she says, her body and her mind have begun working differently. “I’ve let my body soften,” she says. “I’ve let it relax. There’s a lot of anxiety in the ballet world and nervousness,” but in contemporary dance, she feels more grounded. “There’s this calmness that I didn’t have in ballet because I was always up so high on my toes. For me there’s a parallel between how I was dancing and how I was feeling.” After decades of sewing ribbons onto pointe shoes every night, she now rehearses in socks, or bare feet, or canvas ballet flats.

Her new role allows her far more artistic control than she had as a ballerina. She chooses who choreographs on her, she designs programs, she wields far more power than she could as a dancer — something most ballerinas never get to experience before or after they retire. It took some getting used to. “I was so comfortable with my ballet power, my dancer power, that to have a voice, the comfort with having a voice, is slower to come to me,” she says. “I’ve always had a point of view, but to be in the front of the room, I didn’t move into a front of the room position until I retired, and that was really slow. “ While contemporary dance sees more women at the front of the room — running rehearsals instead of dancing in them — than classical ballet does, there’s still an enormous gender imbalance. Most dance companies are run by men, and most choreographers (even those with whom Whelan now collaborates) are men.

Above all, Whelan doesn’t plan to stop dancing, even if she’s not dancing ballet anymore. After she retired, she had a full hip replacement, which she says left her totally pain-free. She says that good genes and “great energy” in her family gave her a body that took easily to dance and was able to keep dancing long after most people have to stop, “a lucky body, not a great body.”

Still, she’s no longer on the regimented rehearsal schedule of a principal ballerina, and when asked what she most misses and least misses, she answers both questions the same way: “I really miss dancing all day long,” she says. “But something I really love is not dancing all day long. I love that I can’t rely on dancing all day long to stay creative.” After the heartbreak of leaving her old self behind, she’s found that she didn’t need it as much as she thought, or feared.

As for the beautiful and cruel ballet slippers that she put on her feet every day for almost 40 years, the bodily extensions that are synonymous with the ballerina, does she miss those? “Sometimes I miss being en pointe, but not a whole lot,” she says. “Every once and a while I would love to float for a minute on a shoe. But for the most part, I did it long enough that it’s OK.”

”Wendy Whelan: Restless Creature” opens June 9th and will be in limited release.

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Six months after Donald Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States, it feels as if America has never been more obsessed with late-night political comedy.  

A willingness to wade ever deeper into political waters has been widely credited for ratings success: Stephen Colbert beat out former late-night king Jimmy Fallon, a happily apolitical host, in total viewers this season largely by attacking the president. Meanwhile, Season 42 of “Saturday Night Live” enjoyed a 23-year ratings high with Melissa McCarthy’s role as Sean Spicer, Kate McKinnon’s turn as Kellyanne Conway and Alec Baldwin’s spot-on Trump.

But as biting as it can be, the humor of “SNL” and “The Late Show” probably isn’t changing any minds.

If anything, the country’s love affair with political comedy may actually be deepening the divides that characterized the 2016 presidential election, according to one researcher.

To Heather LaMarre, who studies politics in entertainment media at Temple University, the Trump jokes and satire that flood social media are nothing new. What’s different about the past several months has been the environment those jokes are landing in. Trump, unlike many of his presidential predecessors, is responding ― loudly and with anger.

Whereas public figures might have ignored comedians in the past, or been good sports and gone along with the jabs, Trump has gone the opposite route, attacking comics over Twitter. His repeated comments have wedged a line: You are either with Trump, and against late-night, or with late-night, and against Trump. That can make Americans just a little bit curious to see what all the fuss is about, driving up ratings to shows.

But in such an aggressive environment, no one softens enough to allow themselves to be persuaded. They just dig their heels into previously held attitudes, meaning conservative and liberal viewers likely turn from the latest “SNL” skit or Seth Meyers monologue with different takes.

“The people who were already anti-Trump are going to become more anti-Trump, and the people who are pro-Trump are not going to walk away from him just because of something a political comedian said,” LaMarre said.

She then added, “Especially if they think of that comedian as a Hollywood elite.”

Despite being a former reality TV star, Trump routinely separates himself from Hollywood, and many of his public lashings out have revolved around a theme of victimization by such elites and the press that cover them.

LaMarre argues that Trump has aligned late-night comedians even more closely with Hollywood celebrities and the press ― groups he does not like ― by attacking them on Twitter or elsewhere. Doing so “raises this automatic reaction among anybody who maybe doesn’t like the press, or doesn’t like Hollywood’s influence in politics, which largely is the conservative base in America,” she said. 

For more liberal viewers, late-night shows offer a feeling of catharsis as their beliefs are articulated and reinforced. 

“Political entertainment provides a release valve,” LaMarre said.

At least one host sees that as his precise purpose ― as “an emotional release valve” ― and certainly doesn’t have grand ideas about his impact on the American political landscape.

“We’re not actually affecting the world,” Colbert told an audience at New York’s Vulture Festival on Saturday, asked whether he ever felt as if his show wasn’t making a difference. “It’s an art in that we’re an emotional effect on the audience, but we don’t affect the world of policy that much.”

“The truth of it is that you’re shouting into an Altoid tin and throwing it off an overpass,” the host said of his ability to influence politics.

LaMarre laughed at that characterization, countering that even if it’s not changing the world, late-night TV can be “very enjoyable and entertaining for people.”

“It can have a lot of emotional benefit even if it doesn’t have a politically persuasive outcome,” she said.

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Warning: This article contains nudity and may not be appropriate for work. 

”What I remember is laying on the bathroom floor,” Brooklyn-based artist Rowan Renee wrote in 2015. “I might be four, or five, or six years old. It was always in the bathroom.” 

As a child, Renee, who is gender non-binary, was abused and molested by their father. Renee’s mother and grandmother were also victims of sexual assault. “Is this story not yet tired of rewriting itself?” Renee continued. “Obedient daughters and wives. Women taught that to speak out means to be shunned, brutalized or killed. Women taught to hate their bodies as much as the people who ravage them … Women who are abused and set out to find what lays beyond it, like me.”

Renee’s father was eventually convicted of lewd and lascivious battery of a 13-year-old boy and sentenced to 15 years in prison. He died while incarcerated. Five years after his death, Renee began to explore the physical and psychological traces years of incest and abuse left behind, using their camera as a guide. 

For the series “Bodies of Wood,” Renee photographed their partially nude body in various positions of power and submission, tension and release. In one image, Renee sits naked on a kitchen counter alongside a sink, clutching the edges of a stained glass window. The dilapidated domestic space surrounding them recalls the work of Francesca Woodman, whose photos explore how women’s bodies can simultaneously evoke presence and absence.

In another, Renee again lies naked amongst fragments of splintered wood, their face shielded from view. The image is reminiscent of the spirit of Cuban artist Ana Mendieta, who placed her body in nature in order to envelop herself in the primordial elements of the universe ― responsible for the life and death of all things. 

Mendieta’s spirit looms over Renee’s project. As a woman who was subjected to violence at the hands of a man she loved, Mendieta plummeted to her death at 33 years old, after falling from the window of the apartment she shared with her husband, artist Carl Andre. Andre, who was heard fighting with Mendieta just before her death, and was found with scrapes across his face afterward, was charged and eventually acquitted of her murder.

“Women who are thrown out of windows, like Ana Mendieta,” Renee wrote. 

With their series, named after a Carl Andre quotation, Renee reclaims their body, formerly a site of pain, imbuing it with the potential to experience pleasure. In the process, Renee proves a nude photography subject is neither vulnerable or powerless by default, giving their body a tangled mess of agency, rage, forgiveness and desire. 

Read HuffPost’s interview with Renee below. 

This series grapples with brutal violence within a family unit. Can you talk about your decision to address these issues in an abstract visual language? Why did you opt away from more direct representation?

One of the questions I often ask myself is: How do we represent violence without perpetuating it? While incest is a particularly brutal kind of violence, I don’t think the brutal moments are actually the most effective to represent it. For one, depictions of brutality are always at risk of being fetishized. And if not fetishization, they still elicit such strong reactions that they can eclipse the nuance and the deep contradictions that pervade the violence that occurs within the family.

Brutality is the sensationalized moment, but it’s only the beginning. For me, it was more important to focus on subtle, unsettling and deeply psychological responses. There’s a profound realness to the way trauma stays with us long after the traumatic circumstances are over. In that sense, I wouldn’t say my images are abstract. They reflect the longer acting and quieter aspects of trauma that do not typically hold the audience’s attention in mainstream representations.

How did you decide to incorporate your own body into the images? How do you see the relationship between memory and the body?

In the historical role of testimony, brutality is difficult to communicate to people who have never experienced it. My body was essential to this project because no one else can testify to my experiences. Trauma survivors often talk about how memories come up first as physical responses. When people experience trauma they enter a dissociative state. If the trauma is chronic, dissociation becomes a daily survival mechanism that can literally reshape the neural pathways of the brain.

That’s all to say that the relationship between memory and body is a complicated one. The body may communicate things the mind is not ready to consciously accept. The mind may physiologically change in response chronic abuse and begin to see the world differently. Sometimes the process of externalizing memory, in writing or in image, becomes a process of witnessing one’s own memory. Distance can be a space to build compassion for one’s own experience.

What do the words “Bodies of Wood” mean to you?

“Bodies of Wood” is a quote from Carl Andre about sculpture. He says: “Wood is the mother of all matter. Like all women hacked and ravaged by men, she renews herself by giving, gives herself by renewing.” Andre is also believed to have murdered his wife and artist Ana Mendieta, although he was acquitted of the crime. I mention Andre and Mendieta in the zine/personal essay that accompanies “Bodies of Wood,” and I basically call out Andre’s words as a hollow fantasy that men use to justify violence in aesthetic terms. The zine was how I brought a more literal narrative about my childhood in relation to the imagery. [Editor’s Note: The zine can be read here.]

Where are these images shot? What drew you to these spaces?

All of the images were shot during a five-week artist residency on a houseboat in Sausalito, California, called the VAR Program. The boat used to belong to Alan Watts and Agnes Varda, and was decked out with much of the original decor. I often worked on the boat because it was so strange and evocative, interacting with particular areas or pieces of architecture that resonated with me. Other times I went for meandering bike rides along the Marin Coastal Reserve. The outdoor shoots were much riskier, because they inevitably involved me taking off my clothes while alone in the woods, often very close to active trails.

There’s one image that I took in a parking lot on the way back from one of my walks. It had been raining and the sun broke through the clouds in a beautiful way. After some deliberation I decided to do it, but I would leave my underwear on. There’s obviously a bit of fantasy in that logic. Of course I know that underwear would do little to protect me from an awkward encounter or a physical threat. But, I think the actual precariousness of my body was necessary to capture that feeling in the image.

You describe your photographs as “solitary performances for the camera.” What does this mean to you and how does it differ from sitting for a portrait?

When I talk about my process for producing these images, I often describe being in dialogue with both the camera and my unconscious. I didn’t think of the process purely in terms of constructing an image. Instead, I think about channeling a specific moment, place, and state of mind. In the language of “mindfulness,” I sought to capture a moment of total presence.

The photos also deal explore tensions related to gender-based violence and victimhood. How does posing nude for the camera, a traditionally feminine and submissive role, feel for you? Do you find it objectifying, empowering, healing? What is the relationship between subject and victim, in your opinion?

Working with the nude female form in these images is a sleight of hand. The context of incest adds conflict to the desirability of the body in the minds of most viewers. They are confronted with the discomfort of having to hold two opposing truths, that the body shown has been violated and is speaking openly about violation, and the body shown is desirable. And I think that speaks more accurately to the aftermath of trauma.

Victimhood has a way of removing agency from individuals and pathologizing adverse experiences, setting victims of sexual violence into a category where they are meant to unfairly carry the burden of shame, and are expected to be “broken” by their experiences. I don’t think of my body as submissive in these images, I think of it as confrontational, transgressing the taboos that would rather not see me or acknowledge the resilience, strength, and empowerment that can be claimed from the position of “victim.”

In a statement, Aperture described how the images represent a journey to rediscover pleasure after violence and trauma. How, if at all, did creating these works affect your relationship to physical pleasure?

Through “Bodies of Wood” I began to understand what it means to experience artistic inspiration. Something happened where I became uninhibited and was able to tap into a fundamental life force. While I was working on “Bodies of Wood,” I felt a profound joy. That feeling was connected to the feeling of freedom. But it also was connected to the feeling of my craft. I had developed a fluency at making images, and I could wield it with power and confidence. The experience of creative genesis was a source of pleasure in this project. Being able to access that part of me builds wellsprings in every other aspect of my life.

Creative expression is often associated with therapy and healing. Was creating this work a therapeutic process? If not, how would you describe its effect psychologically?

There have been many therapeutic aspects to making this work, but I think the one with the most implications for social change is the process of breaking the silence. The taboo in our society is not the incestuous act — it’s common and the perpetrators are frequently protected from consequence. The taboo is talking about it. As long as incest is something that cannot be openly discussed, we will see this kind of violence continue to be used as a tool to control behavior and dominate.

Can you share a reaction to the series, whether positive or negative, that stood out to you?

As part of the weekend-long program at Aperture, we collaborated with The Voices and Faces Project to host a testimonial writing workshop for survivors of gender-based violence and other human rights abuses. One of the writing exercises was to look at “Bodies of Wood” and react to a single image with a piece of writing. Hearing the participants’ stories was like witnessing creative genesis.

It was also an exercise in relinquishing control of interpretation. I was surprised at how the writers in the workshop landed so close to my original inspirations, while still inflecting the images with their own experience. It was as if the images had tapped into the collective unconscious and that was legible in people’s responses.

Need help? Visit RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Online Hotline or the National Sexual Violence Resource Center’s website.

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These Pokémon come from a land down under.

Pixel art designer Paul Robertson has created 151 Australian-themed characters — and each and everyone of them is a real beaut.

Robertson shared his own antipodean take on the Pokedex to Twitter late Thursday. Our favorite? The “Stubbee” beer bottle creature. (A “stubby” is Australian slang for “beer bottle.”)

Check out all of his characters here: 

HuffPost has reached out for further information to find out why Robertson decided to create his own army of Aussie-style characters. 

What is clear, however, is that fellow Twitter users are absolutely in love with his efforts:

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