At the height of the Second World War, Beryl Grey—who would become the first English ballerina invited to perform at the Soviet-run Bolshoi Ballet—was dancing in Swan Lake at a London theater when a V2 bomb exploded nearby; the blast coincided with a particularly dramatic moment in Stravinsky’s score, and Dame Beryl, as she later reported, “carried on dancing.” Ballet, to put it succinctly, has a history of resilience.
This spring and summer, with live and live-streamed ballets off the table, most companies transplanted their performances into the virtual space. New York City Ballet filled six weeks of programming with footage that was originally meant for the company’s eyes only. “They were supposed to be cut and snipped and edited for marketing purposes,” explains Wendy Whelan, associate artistic director. NYCB combed through recordings to curate a best-of season that, for technical as well as curatorial reasons, would have been impossible IRL. At American Ballet Theatre, the company kicked off its online season with a piece specially commissioned for the internet. The Paris Opera Ballet, meanwhile, enlisted famed director Cédric Klapisch (L’Auberge Espagnole) to edit a video tribute to health workers in France; 61 dancers performed in their kitchens and stairwells and hallways to Prokofiev’s score for Romeo and Juliet, errant toddlers wandering into view.
Though admiring of the efforts, I was nonetheless dubious that these online incarnations could match the art form’s analogue charms: the mad dash to Lincoln Center, settling in beneath the twinkling Swarovski chandeliers, and feeling a sense of fulfilled duty in having overdressed for the occasion—the ballet deserves it. It all makes for a glorious, romantic evening, an experience that did not resemble what I had ahead of me one night in late April when, alone in my living room, I navigated to the NYCB YouTube channel. To say I had low expectations would suggest I had any expectations at all.
One of the four ballets on the evening’s program was Jerome Robbins’s Afternoon of a Faun, with music by Debussy.
“This ballet requires more rehearsal than almost any other,” said principal dancer Sterling Hyltin, introducing the piece. Set in a ballet studio, a pair of dancers practice a new work—their eyes are fixed to the mirror as they watch for the other’s approval; they are dancing for each other and falling in love along the way. “I must spend a great deal of time rehearsing it in a real studio, facing a real mirror in order to gain a muscle memory,” Hyltin explains. Cut to the footage: Hyltin is on a darkened stage with Joseph Gordon, filmed from an up-close vantage impossible from even the first row in the orchestra pit, every flicker of emotion readily apparent.
Like the pointe slipper, the digital season is a ballet experiment, but it seems to be one that has legs. “What used to be ephemeral,” says the executive director of ABT, Kara Medoff Barnett, “all those live performances that slipped through our fingers—in the future, we must capture them.” She continues, describing her company’s immediate plans for pieces designed for digital distribution: “We are also exploring site-specific works in controlled settings and immersive VR and AR projects. While our main dining room may be temporarily closed, the ABT Test Kitchen is buzzing with energy.”
As Vogue critic Cecelia Ager wrote in 1940 of ABT’s early years, ballet has always thrived in the midst of tumult. “For when it’s surrounded by nothing but love, it is the very nature of a ballet company to sicken and die,” Ager wrote. “It’s a thing that’s got to have controversy, a conflict, a good clean—or dirty, it doesn’t matter—fight.”