Dancing in Place (review)

Although the dance world shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic, my last article's pronouncement that dancers had become wallflowers has proven short-sighted. On the contrary, these extraordinary athletes have worked vigorously while sheltering in place, keeping fit in small apartments, taking company class via Zoom, rallying comrades to help the sick and preserve dancers' careers and companies' lives, and supporting the struggle for social justice. Toward these goals, dancers and choreographers have created and posted new work designed for video, an entirely different swan from live choreography. Next issue's article will discuss some of the new political choreography just beginning to emerge on video in response to the murders of George Floyd and others; here I'll examine new dance videos that imaginatively defy the pandemic by virtually reassembling performers restricted to quarters into a community.

American Ballet Theatre principal Misty Copeland and former ABT dancer Joseph Phillips convened 32 ballerinas, sheltering all over the world, for the six-minute Swans for Relief, a fundraiser for dancers thrown out of work or off health insurance while almost every dance company on the planet suspended operations. Cellist Wade Davis plays, twice, "The Swan," from Saint-Säens's Carnival of the Animals, as ballerina after ballerina dances The Dying Swan, Mikhail Fokine's 1905 solo for Anna Pavlova. Except for two or three recorded in a studio, each woman dances in decidedly non-theatrical surroundings—sparse apartments, living rooms hung with family mementos, backyards—employing balletic vocabulary whose artifice, paradoxically, projects feelings that mirror the rhythms of life.

Copeland begins the number solidly in a furnished living room. The camera starts on her feet but then, inexcusably, travels up her body, depriving us of key information and pleasure. We never even see the feet of the Paris Opera Ballet's Hannah O'Neill or the Royal's Francesca Hayward; as if aware of this gaffe, the video cuts to Royal Danish ballerina Ida Praetorius, shot from floor level to display her entire regal form. (Editing is uncredited; the dancers were recorded by themselves or family members.) Although we never stay with any ballerina longer than a couple of measures, the shifting angles offer continual fascination. After a three-quarter angle shot of Ballet Philippines' Denise Parunga on a concrete terrace, folding herself deeply to the ground, wing-arms swept behind her, we dissolve to Norwegian National Ballet's Whitney Jensen, also deeply folded, but in profile in a white studio. She brings those arms forward, bends backward, then dissolves into ABT's Skylar Brandt, framed by a rustic arched building entrance. Some unusual angles work handsomely: New York City Ballet's Sara Mearns, for example, shown from the back in a bare city apartment, stretches to her full height, then flutters arms whose muscles evoke wings.

Shelter, a five-minute video work by Alexander and Valentina Reneff-Olson, uses a similar strategy—many soloists in succession montaged into a complete dance—to showcase not classic but new choreography by Danielle Rowe and Garen Scribner, collaborating with San Francisco Ballet principal Joseph Walsh. We again see dancers performing alone in their homes, but unlike Swans for Relief, Shelterexpresses their urgency, anxiety, and anomie while sheltering in place, the balletic imagination hemmed in by walls. More than half of Shelter's 26 performers are men, and many are modern dancers. As with Swans, the dancers or their families videoed their performances.

Unlike Swans, however, the choreography, while linear, keeps returning to its performers at different stages of the dance, creating a recursive continuity. Walsh appears several times, establishing a template for the choreography. He begins the work by walking away from the camera, hunched slightly (it's not a dancer's walk), shirtless, in track slacks, down a narrow hallway in his home. Piano music begins, Beethoven sonata excerpts, played by Thomas Lauderdale and Jacob Van. Walsh continues walking away, but now, in a stunning spatial contrast, at center stage of San Francisco's empty War Memorial Opera House, where his company performs. He moves to his left, extends his left arm, and we...