Suzanne's Mom's Blog

One of the things we will keep from the pandemic is spending time outdoors, whether we do more of our exercise in nature or attend performance arts under the open sky. In today’s story, we learn about how ballet went outside, spurred on by Covid.

Sarah L. Kaufman reports at the Washington Post, “Sara Mearns, the New York City Ballet star, whirls through a public park in sneakers and a lime-green bodysuit, all zany glamour with a ’90s vibe.

“In a sly little film simply titled Another Dance Film, Mearns powers uphill past a jogger, reaching the top of an amphitheater’s seating gallery. She doesn’t stop. With the same ferocity, she plunges down the tiers, long hair whipping as she kicks, struts and hops from step to step. Ballerina as all-terrain vehicle.

“The film, directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, is just five minutes long, but it does a lot of work. It blows apart some key assumptions, shattering the uptight ballet-dancer stereotype and airing weighty artistic differences between Mearns and her creative team, which we hear in voice mails that accompany the film.

“Crucially, it also liberates dance from illusion. Mearns isn’t in the imaginary world of the theater, creating an imaginary character. She’s herself, or a convincing version of herself, navigating the real world of cyclists, people-watchers, concrete and chain-link.

“She’s not alone. Another Dance Film is part of a fascinating trend to strip dance of artifice by cinematizing it in outdoor settings. …

“While Mearns is bouncing down the risers in Another Dance Film, for instance, there’s a conversation going on about vulnerability and risk-taking. Mearns: ‘Look, I told Andrea like five times that I don’t want to dance on stairs!’ Andrea Miller, the choreographer: ‘It’s okay that she feels uncomfortable. Why does everything have to be so perfect?’

“The effect is intentionally droll as we watch Mearns dance the hell out of those stairs. But the point is profound. This piece is about busting out of a fancy theater setting and exposing what’s usually kept away from the public. So much real human drama is hidden behind the polish of conventional performance, but not here.

“Nothing can replace the pleasures of live performance — that’s a given. Yet here’s what surprises me. As new dance works surfaced on my laptop, something beautiful happened to this art form I thought I knew. It gained strength from the natural environment. ‘Natural’ in the fullest sense of the word: unvarnished, even un-marvelous, existing comfortably or uncomfortably in nature. …

“By featuring outdoor environments around the world, dance inserts itself into the urgent global conversation about climate change. These films line up with one of the most pressing human dramas of all time. They recognize that the story is outside, in the weather and the sun.

“It might be in an urban alley, as in Now, a perspective-tilting mini-film shot in the shadowy rubble of Shanghai. Or on a stone-covered English beach in Toke, a meditation on isolation and belonging, performed by Danish dancer Toke Broni Strandby, who was born with one arm. He tells us in a voice-over that he never feels disabled when he’s dancing. These, along with Another Dance Film, can be viewed on films.dance and its social media sites, including Instagram, YouTube and Vimeo. …

“The arrival of these films has been gradual but inevitable. Over the past year, dance companies around the world have pivoted to become media companies. They’re publishing blog posts and interviews. They’re live-streaming and webcasting artist talks and Zoom productions, and offering digital content such as behind-the-scenes shorts and fully staged performances from their archives. As the shutdown restrictions eased, many dance companies also turned to filmmaking.

“In many cases, collaborations sprang up among producers, directors, choreographers and dancers scattered around the globe. They joined virtually, with limited rehearsals.

“The short, atmospheric outdoor films that resulted combine the primal force of dance, the rawness and poignancy of the outdoors, and what filmmaking can do with time, space and sound: slow motion, close-ups, the use of wind and birdsong. The effect can be deeply emotional.

” ‘Filmmaking is such a powerful art form of its own,’ says choreographer Jacob Jonas, who launched Films.dance last January. … ‘In film, you can isolate part of the body, a hand or the head, and use filmmaking to capture what you couldn’t ordinarily see live.’ …

“Jonas, 29, directs a contemporary dance troupe called Jacob Jonas the Company, in Santa Monica, Calif. He’s long worked in film for his troupe and commercial projects, and when the pandemic froze the normal, in-person creative strategies for dance, he saw filmmaking as a solution ‘to keeping the art form alive when the curtain was down.’

“Jonas set a goal of 15 films themed around nontraditional collaborations. He wanted the project to feel global, and ended up with locations around the world — Brazil, Nigeria, Spain — as well as movement artists from more than 25 countries and young, untested choreographers.

“ ‘Theaters often don’t want to take risks on newer artists because of ticket sales,’ Jonas says. ‘With this platform, we can prove that those collaborations are successful.’ ”

More at the Post, here.