Groups of us in the company gather regularly on Slack and Zoom to strategize about how to strengthen and reshape our community to prepare for what we hope will be a transformed cultural landscape. In some ways this time away from the studio and the stage has felt necessary. But with the exception of an idyllic bubble residency in Martha’s Vineyard with 18 other dancers in October, it has been some time since I have really danced with my colleagues. In the fall I got to return to City Ballet’s studios at Lincoln Center to dance on my own, and more recently I have been dancing in our studios with small groups of masked colleagues, maintaining our distance and sticking primarily to ballet class exercises. #ONSTAGE DANCE STUDIO PORTABLE#With my portable dance mat I have taken ballet class remotely from the five New York City apartments that I’ve stayed in since March from my sister’s garage, driveway and deck in Maine and from my parents’ living room in Philadelphia. Used to gathering in sweaty groups in windowless rooms where we constantly hugged and touched one another out of both choreographic and emotional necessity, we have spent the last year dancing alone in small studios of our own making. But this is the longest I have danced with someone else in quite some time, and after running it in this first rehearsal I am winded.Īfter the onset of the pandemic last year, my life and my colleagues’ lives, like everyone else’s, were radically transformed. The excerpt we are preparing, for a film directed by Sofia Coppola for the company’s virtual spring gala, clocks in at just 2 minutes and 11 seconds. It is a far cry from work as we have known it, but we are back in studios we know, dancing steps we’ve danced for years, and we are holding hands. Ashley and I have been tested for Covid twice and we both wear masks. We’re working on the first moments of George Balanchine’s “Duo Concertant” to prerecorded music on my iPhone, while our repertory director Zooms in, her adorable daughter bouncing on her lap. After more than a year of dancing on our own we’re not used to this sort of closeness. Ashley Bouder and I bump into each other as we dance side by side. It’s early April, and for the first time in 13 months I’m rehearsing with a partner in the New York City Ballet studios. When the music begins, we start to dance.
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