“Your seats are upstairs, hand sanitizer on the right,” the usher said as she scanned my ticket. The ticket was for The Joffrey Ballet, performing at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley, and I was able to go only because the cancellations hadn’t started in earnest yet. It’s been a week since and now I don’t know when I’ll be at a live event again.
My friend and I had come with a single motivation: to see Justin Peck’s The Times Are Racing. But it was a quadruple bill, and so there were three pieces to get through first.
Commedia, by Christopher Wheeldon, “didn’t even seem like a Wheeldon ballet,” my friend said. Our guess was that it was either early Wheeldon or Morphoses-era Wheeldon, which a quick Google search revealed it to be. It felt as though he was searching for a voice. The costumes, unitards with various diamond-shaped patterns, recalled harlequins, and the backdrop featured masks that nodded to commedia dell’Arte, but the choreography was more or less pure ballet, well-danced by the Joffrey. What it lacked was a driving force.
After a pause, Stephanie Martinez’s Bliss was next. I liked it well enough, but even by the time it was over I could not have told you anything about the dance. For me, most notable were the costumes. The men and women appeared to be dressed for two completely different ballets. The men were shirtless in grey dance pants; unremarkable. The women appeared to have stepped off an ice rink, in brightly colored, short-skirted dresses covered with rhinestones.
Perhaps my favorite piece on the program was Beyond the Shore, choreographed by Nicolas Blanc. I kept thinking the ballet was called “Suite,” because the six sections of the piece bore no relation to each other. Turns out that was Blanc’s intention! In a program note, he wrote, “Through the ballet, as well as through the music, the piece leads us to new worlds, each different from the previous one. Each movement inhabits a new environment…I would treat the movements as six consecutive short stories, each time aiming to capture the essence and the mood of the music and the atmosphere it creates.” Blanc was entirely successful in this. I liked the green-clad Christine Rocas and Evan Boersma in “Aerosol Melody (Hanalei),” which felt vaguely aquatic, and my friend liked Victoria Jaiani and Dylan Gutierrez in “Gemini in the Solar Wind,” which felt vaguely galactic. It was also interesting to compare this to Commedia. Each of the disparate sections of Beyond the Shore felt more intentional than all nine sections of Commedia did as a unified whole.
The Times Are Racing is Justin Peck’s 2017 sneaker ballet, originally choreographed for New York City Ballet to Dan Deacon’s America album. NYCB made a trailer for this ballet back when it was created. The trailer is perfect, a thrilling and engaging three minutes that encapsulates the energy of the ballet’s title and the city where it was made and the young people it is purportedly about. It accomplishes its goal of making you want to see the full work being advertised. So here we are, three years after its premiere, finally getting to see The Times Are Racing. “What did you think?” my friend asked as soon as the curtain fell. “You first,” I said. I knew she was nervous the ballet wouldn’t live up to her expectations, and I was nervous for her. “I loved it,” she said. Phew! Immediate relief. “What about you?” I don’t think I even hesitated: “I liked the trailer better.” This is true. It’s also terribly unfair to compare three minutes to 24 minutes. The trailer was shot at a (new, empty, clean) subway station in Manhattan. The choreography was adapted to the space, but part of the thrill is the “live from New York” element. In person, the ballet is performed on a bare stage with a black backdrop. It’s almost cold, and I wished that the whole piece could have been danced outside in Sproul Plaza in front of the theater, with the audience standing all around, up staircases and hanging off of balconies. It’s the type of ballet you want to stumble upon, not flash-mob style but “look at this group of young people in sneakers and street clothes just dancing it out.” I would be remiss not to mention two duets in the piece, both of which are entirely gender neutral. You don’t even realize. It’s about having the right people in the parts. In this performance, the tap duet was a man and a woman, and the main pas de deux was danced by two guys. The original cast had two men tapping and a man and a woman in the pas. The pas de deux deserves special mention because the partnering itself didn’t seem gendered. There wasn’t one person doing all the lifting, for example. It felt very shared, and very equal, and the audience loved it.
[To see a couple of clips of the ballet, click here. To see the trailer for The Times Are Racing, click here. Warning: you may want to watch it over and over again.]
On the Tuesday after seeing the Joffrey, I had tickets to A Midsummer Night’s Dream at San Francisco Ballet. As the performance approached, I was getting more excited—a number of people I knew were attending, and there was much discussion about the various casts to choose from. In the end, none of us got to go. SFB performed opening night, after which the City of San Francisco closed the War Memorial Opera House to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. SFB has since cancelled all performances through April 5. After that remains to be seen.
I have been, personally, extremely saddened by all the performance cancellations. Before anyone jumps in and starts telling me why the cancellations are necessary and important, let me make it clear: I am fully aware of the gravity of the situation, of the need for containment, and of the role that not having hundreds or thousands of people in close proximity plays in supporting the successful combat of the virus.
But side by side with that I am sorry for all of the performances that no one will get to see. Even more than that, I am sorry for all the artists who have worked so hard but will not get to perform. If it were me who had been anticipating a debut (or competition, or whatever other thing I had trained and practiced for), I would be devastated.
In these times of crisis, so often we turn to art. Right now, live art is all but unavailable to most of us. For the good of the community, yes. Also at a cost to the community. Emotionally, psychologically.
Economically. The news is full of the economic toll of the virus. The performing arts seem to be disproportionally impacted. Ballet and opera and theater and all the rest depend on selling tickets to performances. Which are being cancelled. There’s also all the money already spent in preparation, not only not recouped but essentially evaporated, since in the end it has gone toward nothing. Arts organizations are uniting behind a single message: please consider donating the value of your ticket to us rather than seeking a refund. This request, so critical for the arts, in turn places a huge demand on patrons, who are likely feeling stretched right now as well.
Every day, hour, email brings a new update, another cancellation. The times are racing.
The Joffrey Ballet
March 8, 2020, at 3 pm at Zellerbach Hall
Commedia, Christopher Wheeldon; Bliss, Stephanie Martinez; Beyond the Shore, Nicolas Blanc; The Times Are Racing, Justin Peck
Going to the Ballet 