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  • Shadow Ballrooms
  • Jay Rogoff (bio)

In the 1930s and ’40s, players in baseball’s Negro Leagues perfected a between-innings warmup exhibition they called “Shadow Ball.” They would thrill fans with lightning throws, lunging stops, and spectacular leaping catches, all choreographed without using a baseball. The legend relates that they mimed the action so convincingly that many fans swore they had seen the ball zip from player to player, denying the evidence of their senses and embracing this highly skilled illusion.

After the pandemic shut down live dance performance, a good number of choreographers and troupes experimented with ingenious ways of designing new dances for video, some of them cramped by the restrictive spaces of individual dancers’ apartments, some unfolding more expansively in actual urban or rural outdoor settings of the sort that set designers have long attempted to evoke in ballets sophisticated or bucolic. Last fall, however, dance companies returned to the stage in programs [End Page 304] that combined new and revived works, recorded and streamed on video and performed live in front of no one but the camera crew. This strange arrangement (made stranger by the curtain calls to canned applause some companies resorted to in a feeble echo of live performance) yielded some new works that, although created under COVID restrictions, should hold their own on the stage after the pandemic ends. In particular, new works made for ballet dancers by modern dance choreographers Jessica Lang and Kyle Abraham should enjoy a long post-pandemic life. But premiering, as they did, as video events rather than live performances, these dances had their birth in what we might call shadow ballrooms, where real dances played out with no live audience to watch them and no live dancers for us to watch. The creators of the earlier pandemic dances-for-video intended to present cinematic products, but these new dances, recorded on stage, conveyed an impression of shadows and ghosts.

That impression was not necessarily unintended, nor was it necessarily a bad thing. In fact, Jessica Lang calls her new work for Pacific Northwest Ballet Ghost Variations, and her choreography has made a virtue of pandemic necessity. To prepare it for its streaming premiere, as part of the November program in PNB’s virtual season, she worked with two pods of four dancers each, all of them wearing masks and never commingling through the ballet’s creation. The only dancers who touch are Dylan Wald and Elle Macy, who live together, in the finale of this seven-section, 20-minute ballet. Lang uses social distancing onstage to show psychological and emotional yearning and alienation, as well as haunting shadows created by dancers performing behind the back curtain. A skilled choreographer of romantic and Romantic moods—her 2015 Schubert ballet, The Wanderer, touchingly chronicled young love, heartbreak, and despair—in Ghost Variations, working without a narrative, she evokes romantic attraction, hardship, and separation, suggesting the doomed love of Robert and Clara Schumann, whose piano music, played by Christina Siemens, makes up the score. Robert Schumann finished Ghost Variations, his final composition, in 1854, just before entering the asylum for the insane where he died two years later. Lang’s dancing shadows also make it a pandemic ballet, alluding to the absences among us—as I write, half a million in the United States alone.

Reed Nakayama’s lighting, while dark and moody, nevertheless reveals all the movement clearly. Even with the stage at its darkest, his spotlights reveal the dancers’ feet and legs articulating the choreography (the men dance barefoot, the women in toe shoes). Jillian Lewis’s costuming features long, dark Romantic jackets over bare chests for the men, and dark dresses with Romantic tulle skirts for the women. Each outfit is unique, with uneven skirts and jagged panels on the women’s bodices and some of the men’s jackets that make the costumes look perversely damaged. This sense of damage, combined with the men’s bare feet and chests, instills a disturbing feeling of something gone awry, alluding quietly to Robert Schumann’s suffering mind and what must have been the unbearable excisions in his and Clara’s married life. [End Page 305]

Lang begins her...

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