Four dancers slid their feet into the shallow reflecting pool on the north side of Lincoln Center. Wide and tranquil, the pool is situated between David Geffen Hall, where the New York Philharmonic no longer plays, and the Vivian Beaumont Theatre, where actors no longer act. Just to the south, past a grove of London plane trees, is the Metropolitan Opera, where sopranos no longer sing “Madama Butterfly.” Detractors of Lincoln Center have compared the place to a mausoleum, but the absence of artists—and audiences—has made its hulking marble structures particularly sepulchral.
Nevertheless, on this fall morning, something lively and strange was happening. The dancers stepped onto the pool’s concrete floor, scattered with good-luck pennies, like explorers toeing virgin terrain. Instead of pointe shoes, they wore waterproof booties, the kind used by windsurfers. The water came up to their calves. They were pleased to find that the bottom wasn’t slippery; one dancer noted that it had a “sandpapery grip.” The choreographer Andrea Miller waded in after them. “One small step for man,” she said, through a blue paisley mask. “One giant leap for New York City Ballet.”
In normal times, City Ballet performs at Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theatre. But the covid-19 pandemic has made that, too, a mausoleum. The spring season was cancelled in March, and then the fall season was as well. For many months, the dancers were separated from the dance. Millions of dollars in revenue were lost. Then, this summer, the company came up with a plan: it would make five short dance films by five choreographers, shot outdoors on the Lincoln Center campus and around town. The result, which has just premièred online, is called “New Works Festival,” but the title doesn’t convey all its paradoxes. What does dance, which depends on bodies sharing space, look like in the age of social distancing? What is ballet outside the proscenium, and without audiences? Then, there are practical quandaries. Can you pirouette on wet concrete—in a mask? How do you choreograph over Zoom?
Miller, one of the five choreographers, had put a lot of thought into these questions. “I always like limitations, to some degree,” she told me. Allowed to select up to four dancers, she had chosen four. (“I just feel like we’ve done a lot alone.”) They had rehearsed in Riverside Park, but this was their first day transposing the steps to the water. Miller and her dancers had checked in at the Geffen stage door, where they answered a questionnaire (“Do you have a fever?”) and got their temperatures taken via thermal scan. In the plaza, for hygiene reasons, they were not allowed to immerse themselves in the water. And they had to stay six feet apart, a choreographic challenge for Miller.
She also found it liberating. With her own company, Gallim, Miller has done site-specific work, including a flash mob at Grand Central Terminal and a piece at the Temple of Dendur. Before the pandemic, N.Y.C.B. had commissioned her to create a piece for its Fall Fashion Gala (cancelled), and she had been plotting to entice the seventy-two-year-old company into using more nontraditional spaces. Now it had no choice. “It’s freeing for those of us who’ve been trying to get people to believe in it,” she said with a laugh. “All of a sudden, they’re, like, ‘Yeah, this is great!’ ”
Miller watched the dancers perform what she called a “jig” around “Reclining Figure,” the bronze sculpture at the center of the pool. Her piece was surf and turf, moving from the grove to the pool, and would be filmed in a single shot. As the dancers, two men and two women, practiced entering the water, they instinctually shifted into épaulement, tilting their cheekbones up in a way that George Balanchine, the company’s founder, likened to asking for a kiss on the cheek. But Miller told them to flatten their bodies; she wanted them to look stoic, hieroglyphic. “Almost like a monk,” she instructed. The empty Lincoln Center had reminded her of a temple. “Without people, without prayer, it’s just stones,” she said.
As she rehearsed a solo with Indiana Woodward, the two men, Harrison Coll and Sebastián Villarini-Velez, sat poolside. “Do you have any idea how long I’ve wanted to put my feet in this water?” Coll said. Miller had set the dance to “Manifiesto,” a sombre guitar ballad by the Chilean protest singer Víctor Jara, and she had translated the lyrics for the dancers early on. In 1973, Augusto Pinochet’s regime had imprisoned and tortured Jara at Chile Stadium. Before executing him, the guards smashed his fingers and then mocked him by handing him a guitar. “In this song, he’s saying, ‘I don’t sing because I have a beautiful voice or because my guitar sounds good. I just sing because it’s my soul. It’s who I am,’ ” Villarini-Velez said. “This pandemic has forced us to shape our identities beyond our profession. Because we start at such a young age, it defines us. It’s good to step back and ask, Why do we dance? I’ve thrived during this time, because it’s allowed me to appreciate things like this. It’s more than just the parts, the bows, the claps.”
“We’re so used to working in studios, having a mirror and really analyzing every part of our shapes and our lines,” Coll added. “Through this process, we’ve never been able to look at ourselves once. Everything about this piece is freeing. We’re usually rehearsing in a building that doesn’t have windows! We’ve been outside, and people will stop and just watch. You get a sense of how the city has reacted to not having art.”
“There was this elderly woman in her wheelchair,” Villarini-Velez recalled. “She had her caretaker stop. She kept pointing at us and touching her heart.”
In the pool, Miller frowned and told Woodward, “It’s not working.” The movements that she had created on land felt “alien” in the water, so she decided to redo the solo. She dunked her hair in the water and improvised. By the time they filmed, the dancers had learned entirely new choreography, including a pas de deux for Woodward and Coll, which was permitted only because the pair have been dating for two years and had been quarantining together, on Ninety-fourth Street.
This was already supposed to be a year of reinvention for N.Y.C.B., after a period of turmoil. In 2018, its longtime artistic director, Peter Martins, retired while under investigation for allegations of physical and sexual abuse against dancers. Martins, who had led the company since Balanchine’s death, in 1983 (he and Jerome Robbins were “co-ballet-masters in chief” for the first six years), denied the allegations, and the investigators could not corroborate the claims against him. Not long after, a nineteen-year-old former student at the School of American Ballet, the company’s affiliate conservatory, discovered that her boyfriend, a principal dancer, had shared explicit images of her with other male dancers and a young donor. She sued the dancers, the school, and N.Y.C.B., which she blamed for creating a “fraternity-like atmosphere.” Last month, a New York Supreme Court judge dismissed nearly all her claims.
The company tried to turn the page. In February of last year, it announced that Jonathan Stafford, a ballet master who’d been appointed as the interim head, would assume artistic leadership, with Wendy Whelan, a former star ballerina, overseeing programming and commissions as the associate director. Whelan, the first woman to hold a permanent artistic leadership position at the ballet, went on a listening tour of the hundred company members, “trying to let them know that I see them as more than just a body,” she told me. She was eager to bring in more contemporary choreographers, especially women and people of color. At the start of this year, she was busy commissioning future pieces by such choreographers as Miller, Jamar Roberts, Pam Tanowitz, and Sidra Bell, who was to be the first Black woman to choreograph for the company.
Plans changed. In March, as the coronavirus spread and N.Y.C.B. projected that cancelling its spring season meant the loss of eight million dollars, it committed to paying its employees through May. The dancers retreated to their apartments or went home to live with their parents, keenly aware that ballet careers don’t last forever. Whelan, whose husband has a heart condition, moved with him to their house upstate. She figured that the company would be back by winter, a lucrative time that includes the cash cow “The Nutcracker.” “We felt a little lucky,” she said.
By June, it was clear that there would be no fall season, no “Nutcracker.” Like the Met, the company made taped performances available for streaming, so that audiences could catch up on “Ballo della Regina” from home. There were devastating human losses. Clem Mitcham, the theatre’s longtime head of security, died of covid complications, as did a member of the marketing staff. The company moved its training courses to Zoom, which opened up unanticipated hurdles. Flooring was an issue. “If you’re on linoleum or a rug or a wood floor, you can’t really work your footing the same way as if you had a Marley dance floor,” Whelan said. The company sent six-by-six-foot strips of vinyl flooring to each dancer. Teaching online had its benefits, though. “I can actually see everybody on a screen—I don’t have to walk around the room,” Whelan said. “I had a panic attack the first time I did it, but I’ve found a way of kind of loving it.” Her mission had been to help drag the company into the new decade. Now it was simply to keep everyone dancing. Was it possible to do both at the same time?
During the summer, Lincoln Center asked the company to help “enliven the plaza” by creating a short film for Pride Month. The result was a ballet solo performed in front of the central fountain, which was lit up in rainbow colors. Whelan expanded the idea to the five socially distanced ballet films, corralling four of the choreographers she had already commissioned, as well as Justin Peck, the company’s resident choreographer. Suddenly, bringing in outsiders who had worked on street corners and at other unconventional sites seemed prescient.
Like Miller, Jamar Roberts was drawn to the reflecting pool as a location. “I’m very interested in tension,” he told me. “I like to imagine that the air is thick. It gives the body more resistance. Or the air is thin, and you slip through it.” His piece, “Water Rite,” a staccato solo for the dancer Victor Abreu, was prompted by a quotation from the jazz saxophonist Archie Shepp. “He referred to jazz as being a lily that grows in spite of the swamp, meaning that it is a music that comes out of oppression,” Roberts said. “I was inspired by that, just thinking of the time that we’re in now. In the midst of such a shitty time, so many beautiful things are being made. Kids are being born. We’re still able to make dance. So this water here represents the swamp, and Victor is the lily.”
Sidra Bell gravitated to the lawn that swoops up from the plaza to the top of a glass-walled restaurant, overlooking Sixty-fifth Street. Bell had been quarantining in White Plains with her father, the composer Dennis Bell, who wrote a string quartet for her piece. “I was rehearsing in the living room, he was composing in the basement,” she said. Bell has an architect’s eye, and she told me that she wanted to play up “the rough edges and the angles” of Lincoln Center, as well as the “skewing and warping” of its reflective surfaces. Her piece, “pixelation in a wave (Within Wires),” features four dancers in skintight monochromatic suits, sometimes dancing at different elevations; their rolling backs and sharp movements make them look like statues in a sculpture garden. As in Miller’s piece, two of the dancers are a couple, and they start the piece with a duet. Romantic pairings within the company, a fraught topic in the past few years, are now an unexpected asset.
The choreographer Pam Tanowitz said that she “fell in love” with the band shell in Damrosch Park, in the southwest corner of Lincoln Center. Her piece, a solo for Russell Janzen, an N.Y.C.B. principal, is a sad-funny meditation on schlepping. Janzen wanders the plaza with his company-issued Marley mat rolled up over his shoulder, trying and failing to unfurl it on inconvenient surfaces. At one point, he changes costumes inside a Calder sculpture, the pandemic having deprived him of a dressing room. Tanowitz, a Bronx native who talks about ballet with the daintiness of a New Yorker trying to catch a cab at rush hour, told me, “Ballet dancers like to make everything look pretty. I like everything messy.”
Choreography is usually taught through the body, limb to limb, hip to hip. But working with Janzen over FaceTime had forced Tanowitz to be more verbal. “I would say to him, ‘Arabesque, shimmy, stay to the right, take two steps from the first ballet you were a principal in,’ ” she recalled. “Instead of saying, ‘Do this shape. Copy me through the computer.’ ” She incorporated the Marley mat after watching him practice with it in a garage. During rehearsal, she led Janzen through his entrance over the grassy pavilion, which had been sprayed with white circles to help sunbathers keep their distance from one another. Nearby, two little girls were eating cookies, and one said, “The energy in the sun is kind of getting weaker, so eventually the sun will pop, and then it’ll turn into a black hole and it’ll suck in all the planets!”
Overhearing her, Tanowitz said, “This should be the text for our film.” Janzen, in a sweatshirt, unrolled his mat on the grass and tried dancing on and around it. He was worried that the lawn might be slippery if they shot in the morning. “I’ll bring a towel to wipe the grass,” Tanowitz said.
Trailed by two costume designers, they walked over to the Met, where Janzen danced within the ribbed wall of the opera house, then to the side of the Koch, where they used a steel barricade as a ballet barre. “Ballet shoes aren’t protective enough for the cement,” Tanowitz told the costumers. “Does it look weird with sneakers?”
“If we want his feet to have articulation, he could wear white leather ballet shoes,” one of them offered.
Janzen changed shoes and hopped onto the band shell’s stage. “Can I take off my mask?” he asked. Maskless, he rehearsed his final routine, which Tanowitz had peppered with allusions to Tchaikovsky and to Schumann’s “Davidsbündlertänze.” Tanowitz said, watching, “I feel lucky that I even have opportunities to make something.”
Christopher Grant, a twenty-five-year-old member of the corps de ballet, stood at the center of a handball court, on a covered pier in Brooklyn Bridge Park. Lower Manhattan sparkled in the background. He wore stretch jeans, sneakers, a red jersey, and a blue Adidas mask, more or less the same outfit as some people shooting hoops nearby. When the time came, he wiped his brow, handed his mask to a production assistant, and started to dance.
It was the first day of shooting for Justin Peck’s piece, four intercut solos that unfold across the city. Peck had chosen the handball court for its “contemporary” feel, he told me: “I didn’t want it to look like nineteen-sixties New York City.” The next day, he’d shoot in Chinatown, outside Nom Wah Tea Parlor, a dim-sum restaurant where his grandfather used to take his father and uncle when they were kids.
Peck and Grant reviewed the steps: an athletic sequence of leaps, développés, chugs, enveloppés, arabesques, and faillis, all of which would be danced on concrete and captured in a continuous dolly shot. Grant mirrored a twirl off Peck’s body, as crew members watched. (Everyone had been thermal-scanned on arrival.) For music, Peck had chosen Chris Thile’s upbeat anthem “Thank You, New York.” Before they began, Peck told Grant to forget about the camera: “Think about what New York means to you.” Grant was born in Queens and lived in Jamaica for a spell, before moving back to the city at age seven. The last time he had danced for an audience was in January, in “Allegro Brillante.” “This is me showing joy that I’m getting to dance again,” he told me.
If Grant had a dance partner, it was Brandon Taylor, the key grip, who had to push the camera along a dolly track in time with the dancing. He wore a T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up, revealing tattoos. “I’ve dollied about three thousand concerts,” Taylor assured the cinematographer, Jody Lee Lipes. “Don’t worry, buddy. I’m a light touch!” But it was tricky; the dancer and the camera had to appear as if in conversation. Peck, who sat behind the camera as it rolled across the track, gave Taylor a hand signal when Grant was about to go into a propulsive leap, so that Taylor could speed up—a mechanical pas de deux.
After five or six tries, they got the timing right. Between takes, Peck would tell Grant to flick his leg more in his rond de jambe, or to dial down moments so that the explosive ones would feel bigger. As they were about to do another take, a stout man in a cap wandered through the court, oblivious. The crew waited as he sauntered out of frame. Taylor laughed: “Not a fuck given.”
In early October, the four other pieces were filmed at Lincoln Center. They were directed by Ezra Hurwitz, a dancer turned filmmaker, whose credits include Smirnoff ads and a Sufjan Stevens music video. Chatty and quick on his feet, Hurwitz knew his grand pliés and his battements and could translate them to Steadicam operators. On a Saturday, Victor Abreu, the lily in the swamp, stood in the reflecting pool in a mustard shirt. A crane pointed a camera toward his face, swooping and gliding in response to his movements. Hurwitz, pacing, asked what time it was. They had to finish before the sun disappeared behind the Met.
Standing nearby was Chris Van Alstyne, the technical director for the Koch Theatre, who was acting as the covid compliance officer. He had trained over Zoom, through an L.A.-based course designed for movie and TV shoots, and had a rolling cart stocked with hand sanitizer, masks, gloves, wipes, and face shields. When he saw people too close together, he would politely ask them to spread out, like a chaperon at a prom. Everyone wore a mask except for the dancers, who had all taken PCR tests. At one point, Hurwitz asked two dancers in Bell’s piece to inch closer together, so that they could both fit in the frame, and someone had to remind him that this wasn’t allowed.
The crane rose high above Abreu, capturing his spinning, splashing body from a bird’s-eye view. “Cut!” Hurwitz yelled. Roberts, the choreographer, observed quietly, occasionally reminding Abreu to look up, not at his feet, while running through the water. They filmed until dinner, and Abreu was soaked up to his shoulders. “I do not envy you,” Hurwitz told him. “But you’re going to look beautiful, like Poseidon.”
Earlier that day, Harrison Coll and Indiana Woodward had filmed the pas de deux in Andrea Miller’s piece. “I’m so excited to be here and working,” Coll said, packing up, “but it’s sad to think that I don’t know when the next time this is going to happen is.”
The couple had given up their New York apartments, and the next day they were flying to California, to stay with Woodward’s parents. “There was just no way we could pay our rent without a salary,” Coll said. While furloughed from the company, they would collect unemployment, or maybe teach remote dance lessons. “I’m from the city, and I’ve never lived anywhere else, so it’s weird for me,” Coll said. “When the company has stable employment for us, we’re going to be back in a flash.” ♦
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