Spinning in place
Back before someone pressed a finger on the pandemic pause button and wouldn’t let go, ballet companies created large-scale works in wide-open studios full of people sweating together. Cellphones were put away, although a videographer might have filmed from a corner, so the choreographer could review each day’s progress.
No dance made since March has come together that way.
Houston Ballet, like the rest of the world’s companies, closed its Center for Dance four months ago to comply with COVID-19 protocols. It also canceled half of its 2019-20 programs, spring’s outdoor performances and a three-week tour to Spain.
“I think it will really be a while before we have a blockbuster ballet and fill the theater and the orchestra pit with people,” artistic director Stanton Welch says.
He tries not to focus on the heartbreaks. “In Houston, we’ve been through hurricanes and floods,” he says. “We’re always positive.” He sounded more resigned than chipper. The past months have been an emotional roller coaster. “We had to get to a place where we were not depressed,” Welch says. “So we think, ‘What can we make?’ That’s a healthier thing for all of us.”
His new work, “Dancing With Myself,” is a virtual dance. Welch calls it a “zallet,” short for Zoom ballet, because the rehearsals were remote, conducted through Zoom. The six-minute piece began streaming July 10 on the Houston Ballet’s Facebook, Instagram TV and YouTube pages.
The music is Billy Idol’s early’ 80s hit of the same name. The choreography interprets the lyrics literally, but the attitude is all-American fresh, not hardedged, Idol punk, as it progresses from a zombie shuffle to scenes of increasingly joyful, breakout release.
Welch, who listened to Idol as a teenager, hears humor in the song and likes the energy it exudes. He wanted to show his dancers as they are now, at home, bored but still spirited and optimistic. “We were sweating up a storm together,” he says. “It gave us a chance to have fun.”
Choreographers are still figuring out how to navigate a medium many of them previously shunned. Very few U.S. companies even had compelling video archives to post quickly on their websites when lockdowns began because unions allowed them to film only for archival purposes, using one or two stationary cameras far from the stage.
Now choreographers must also be film directors, and dancers working remotely must be their own camera crews. Those who had not dipped their toes into video apps such as iMovie and Final Cut Pro are crashcoursing. Welch is all in, with the help of Houston Ballet’s dancers and staff.
“This is not a Band-Aid,” he says. “This is the future.”
Feeling claustrophobic
Some choreographers have aimed for the profound with their early virtual works.
Time seems to stop in Mark Morris’ moody, cinematic “Lonely Tango,” a black-and-white film built with close-ups and a lot of relative stillness. It’s more about micro-movement than dancing in the traditional sense.
Alvin Ailey resident choreographer Jamar Roberts’ devastating solo “Cooped,” commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum’s terrific Works & Process series, uses the medium expertly, equally powerful as dance and video art.
Small-scale tends to read best in the compressed space of laptop and phone screens. Some dances made during this first phase of pandemic creation have an almost suffocated sensibility that reflects the times, shot inside homes and apartments where there’s no room for wild leaps, traveling turns and high lifts. Performers go outside for some of that, but concrete and earth present other issues.
“I did a couple of double tours outside and thought I’d lose my legs,” says Oliver Halkowich, a Houston Ballet first soloist, referring to the high, turning leaps called tour jetés.
The boundaries of virtuosity have shifted in other ways, too. Halkowich was already proficient with his phone camera, “although I have not been one to film myself,” he says. Many of his fellow dancers were far less practiced.
Welch is amazed at how quickly the dancers adapted. “It was remarkable, the speed with which we could do this,” he says. “It’s still not my world. The phone is still an abyss for me.”
Daniel Rivera, the company’s audio-video content manager, has become an important collaborator. Rivera, who filmed Houston Ballet’s “Sylvia” commercials across three locations last season, edited and compiled “Dancing With Myself.” Welch gave him free rein, telling him, “this is your director’s cut.”
To save time while the dancers were filming themselves, Rivera built the video’s structure with about five hours of rehearsal footage, also creating graphics that incorporate Houston Ballet’s logo in an eye-popping ’80s palette. He and Welch wanted to reference but not mimic Idol’s music video of the song. “His video has almost a ‘Mad Max’ world,” Rivera says. “We didn’t want to put out a video that was grungy and apocalyptic.”
At times, the graphics make “Dancing With Myself ” look like a company promo. That was intentional, Welch says. “Even works I was going to make for the stage during our 50th anniversary season would have had some element of that.”
Crazy quarantine costume
From a technical standpoint, Welch sees “Dancing With Myself ” as a baby step into a stairwell with a big learning curve.
The choreography was easy by necessity: No pointe shoes or big, space-eating movements that couldn’t fit, say, between a front door and a kitchen. Although Welch incorporated high kicks, turns and balances, the piece mostly abandons classical ballet vocabulary for loose movements that appear in notes as “Elvis,” “Brady Bunch head” and so on.
The dancers had to position their cameras vertically, which limited side-to-side motions. Rivera needed to be able to mix multiple takes of any scene across the screen, creating a sense of unison movement. His cuts range from one body to as many as 28 squares of body parts, always symmetrical. Not that Idol’s music lends itself to much musicality, but the visual flow is more predictable because of that.
During a Zoom rehearsal in May, Welch was up and down a lot, coaching and answering questions as he danced between his laptop and his fireplace in bad light. He was visible from the knees up. Sometimes he was out of breath. “Better to do all that as one shot,” he advised after one aerobic sequence.
In their own Zoom rectangles, some of the dancers mirrored Welch’s movements. Others took notes intently. A few looked glassy-eyed. They held colorcoded spreadsheets with columns describing the locations of various scenes (closet versus living room versus looking into a mirror, for example), camera angles, costumes (quarantine wear versus dress-up) and step sequences. It was a lot to absorb.
“This part should be outside,” Welch said at one point. “Make it as green as you can, so that all of our space looks lush. Or use a potted plant. Whatever you have.”
The rehearsals “felt good … kind of like a regular day except I’m in a living room, maybe with no pants on,” Halkowich says.
In Florida from March until June, he and his sister Phoebe busied themselves by filming zany virtual dances for their Instagram feeds. For Halkowich, the biggest challenge of “Dancing With Myself ” was framing himself vertically. “Some of the dancier sections took a lot of takes,” he says. “I have a lot of bad videos of myself.”
He was totally game, however, to wear a crazy quarantine costume. He had the outfits. Halkowich has performed since he was a toddler, and his mother “kept everything,” he says. His quarantine-wear includes a wig and a red plaid bathrobe. For the dress-up scenes, he pulled out some gold fringed chaps from an adolescent-era tap-dance concert. They’re shorter on him now, which makes them funnier.
Other dancers express personality with huge, fuzzy house slippers or stiletto heels. Some smear their faces with beauty masks. Some employ their pets as props.
“Stanton sees this as entertainment,” Halkowich says. “That’s important right now. While dance can be grandiose, it can also just be fun. We were all feeling a little crazy, wanting to move.”
Most of the company — about 60 dancers — filmed themselves doing the entire piece and sent files to Rivera, with multiple takes of each scene. “It’s great that dancers are learning this,” Halkowich says. When they do return to a stage, they will have an entirely new perspective on what the audience sees.
They created enough material for Rivera to build multiple versions of “Dancing With Myself.” Welch envisions an all-female cast and an all-male cast in future releases, although it may no longer be a priority.
“We have an insane level of work ahead of us,” he says, referring to the whole, nebulous whatever-is-ahead.
What’s next?
Welch and executive director Jim Nelson aren’t yet ready to announce a plan for the 2020-21 season. That could come later this month.
With Harris County’s pandemic alert at a Code Red level, they have to prepare for the likelihood that the Wortham Theater Center will remain shuttered into September, when Houston Ballet normally stages two programs of six performances each. Houston’s Theater District could even still be closed during the allimportant “Nutcracker” season.
With cash on hand and emergency fund donations, the ballet has so far avoided the layoffs that have gutted Houston Grand Opera and the Alley Theatre.
Still, Welch says, “Revenues are gone. At the moment, it’s going to be about philanthropy and donations.”
“It’s a weird thing to be a ballet dancer right now,” Halkowich says. “I wonder about the young kids coming up. You have to have a goal, and if that goal is muddy, it’s strange.”
Welch says “Dancing With Myself ” will be Houston Ballet’s only zallet set in dancers’ homes. He’d like the next one to be a professionally filmed, one-act ballet. He’s been studying the camera cuts and angles of Bob Fosse’s “Cabaret” for inspiration.
He envisions shooting in the company’s black-box theater, which has a sprung floor that gives with dancers’ weight and accommodates all the virtuosity of classical ballet. Even if they can work only a few at a time, Rivera can combine those images to look like seamless shots. “To explore this and adapt it is only going to benefit us in the long term, even when we’re doing live ballet. Which is of course where we want to be,” Welch says.
He might also re-create existing dances as films. “Indigo” and “Divergence” would be easy to adapt, he says. “They’re both flat-front center ballets. In fact, the third act of ‘Divergence’ might work better on film than in person. You have to think of the scope … but intricate, musical dancing that doesn’t rely on sets would work.”
The company is on its annual break until early August, but in some ways, Houston Ballet has been on a stressful, existential break since March. “Just to stand at the barre (which might be a kitchen counter or a chair) and work it for an hour is a luxury. I also feel the opposite on some days,” Welch says.
He needed to make “Dancing With Myself ” as much as the performers. “The artistic part felt healthy and alive, like we are moving forward,” he says. “Art finds a way … . Our intent is still to be creating.”
“While dance can be grandiose, it can also just be fun. We were all feeling a little crazy, wanting to move.” Oliver Halkowich, first soloist