Photo by Daniel Azoulay
The Miami City Ballet will be featured in this year's Spring to Dance Festival.
Relaxing restrictions and warming temperatures have presented a number of ways forward for local dance companies to produce live performances. In the weeks ahead, look for several options to emerge from behind your computer screens and see the performing arts in person.
On Saturday, the Big Muddy Dance Company presents a stage version of Blue Roses Falling in two shows at The Big Top. The production caps an unconventional 10th anniversary season for the contemporary company, which has already returned to live performances. After three successful online presentations earlier in the season, Lemp Legends played to a limited audience in April via site-specific, roaming performances cycling guests through Lemp Mansion about five at a time.
Blue Roses Falling first débuted in March online, the culmination of a nearly two-year collaboration with multimedia designer Marc Macaranas and composers Oli Chang (Animal Feelings) and Zac Colwell (Fancy Colors). Big Muddy executive director Erin Prange says that Blue Roses’ online viewers will hardly recognize the full-length piece, choreographed by artistic director Brian Enos.
Macaranas’ stunning manipulation of the dancers’ images on film created an immersive environment that may feel a little more 2-D at The Big Top projected near the stage. But Enos says Macaranas plans to incorporate augmented reality technology pre- and post-show as a nod toward the online version, which layered images of dancers over one another and dragged digital distortions across the screen—impossible in a live show.
“The virtual and in-person formats are so different, from the dancing to the audience perspective. It’s almost like they’re two completely different shows,” Prange says. “It’s an adventure for all.”
There are umpteen logistics involved in the return to live dance, during an ongoing pandemic, in a circus tent, no less. But the open-air tent provides optimal seating options for physical distancing and ventilation for guests. Prange says the Kranzberg Arts Foundation, which runs The Big Top, has done its due diligence in developing safety protocols for both performers and audience members.
“From ticketing, to food and beverage services, to dressing rooms, we feel comfortable in their space because we know how much work they’ve done,” she says.
Photo by Gerry Love
Big Muddy's "Blue Roses Falling"
Dance St. Louis also saw the potential and the risk in presenting dance under The Big Top, reviving the Spring to Dance Festival June 25–27 and retooling its formula for the tent.
“We’re in such uncharted territory,” says Dance St. Louis artistic director Michael Uthoff. “We’ve been making adjustments all year round, and it’s exciting that it’s actually happening.”
For over a decade, the annual festival, featuring top-notch local, regional, national, and occasionally international dance companies was presented in the Touhill Performing Arts Center’s two theater spaces. Because the festival relied on companies traveling to St. Louis, Spring to Dance was an unfortunate casualty of the pandemic in 2020. And the late June dates are also new; historically, the fest takes place over Memorial Day weekend.
“We needed to reshape Spring to Dance. It could not be done how it was,” Uthoff says, “and I don’t think it will be for a few years.”
But Uthoff says the shift is also part of a change in focus for Dance St. Louis, which launched the Spring to Dance Festival 12 years ago to “raise the standards of dance in St. Louis." With local companies now taking off, Dance St. Louis has put increasing effort into the other arm of its mission: “Bringing the big guys in,” as Uthoff describes it. “Spring to Dance is still the one way to bring the unknown to our audiences.”
That goal is not without significant cost and has required buy-in from donors and ticket buyers, who had few tickets to buy last year. Executive director Richard Dee says that, despite the enormous challenges COVID-19 imposed on the organization, Dance St. Louis is still healthily in the black and looks forward to pushing ahead beyond Spring to Dance with a modest season of produced concerts in 2021–22. And the Spring to Dance line-up is nothing to sneeze at, either, with guest artists from Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater performing nightly and heavy hitters, largely from Chicago and Kansas City, peppering the weekend.
Meanwhile, St. Louis Ballet has spent the majority of its 2020–21 season dancing to an empty house, filming and streaming its productions for an online audience. For the first time in 15 months, the ballet company will welcome approximately 500 people to the Touhill’s seats across two shows May 29 and 30. The performance will also be available to stream online.
A trio of short works will run about an hour with no intermission (to prevent traffic jams and maximize physical distancing in the audience). The concert also marks the conclusion of artistic director Horiuchi’s 20th season with St. Louis Ballet and displays three generations from New York City Ballet: Balanchine, Martins, and Horiuchi.
Horiuchi’s tenure at SLB has increasingly leaned into Balanchine’s repertoire, a nod to the former NYCB principal dancer’s career with that company. Horiuchi joined NYCB in 1982, near the end of George Balanchine’s life, and progressed through the ranks under Peter Martins’ leadership. Balanchine’s Valse-Fantaisie, set to a frothy Glinka score, and Martins’ Ash, staged by Martins’ son, Nilas, lend a celebratory mood to the evening. The program concludes with a new ballet by Horiuchi set to an original score by composer TOYA, a longtime friend he reconnected with during the pandemic.
The dancers at St. Louis Ballet take COVID tests every two weeks and nearly the whole organization is vaccinated, which has allowed for more partnering and switching up casting bubbles compared to previous productions this season.
“We feel a little more relaxed,” says Horiuchi. “I think the transition [to live performances] is easier because we’ve been performing since October. Back then, it was scarier.”
The leaders of each organization admit the year has been exhausting but also filled with silver linings. “I’m an eternal optimist,” Prange says, “but I feel like so many of these changes and challenges we’ve run into—we’ve come out on the other end with these really cool things we would never have otherwise done.”
Like dance in a circus tent, for example.
Big Muddy Dance Company performs May 22 at The Big Top, 3401 Washington Ave. Tickets start at $35, available at kranzbergartsfoundation.org/the-big-top. St. Louis Ballet Live! takes place May 29 and 30 at the Touhill Performing Arts Center, 1 University Blvd. on the University of Missouri-St. Louis campus. Tickets are $35, with free streaming access available at stlouisballet.org. Spring to Dance takes place June 25-27 at The Big Top. Tickets are $25, available in pods of 2-5 people at dancestlouis.org.
