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Pointe at the kitchen counter and more: How ballet dancers are adapting amid a pandemic

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While physical and financial challenges persist, the dance world is reinventing itself online.
Ballet training begins at the barre, but in the age of the coronavirus pandemic, a kitchen counter and the back of a couch has become a substitute for even America’s most elite ballerinas. When the pandemic began shutting down the country, entire seasons were put on hold. But while the show can’t go on, the training continues. «Our bodies are… very much the instrument that we use to express our art and so, a ballet dancer’s body is very highly honed through hours and hours of training,» said Virginia Johnson, artistic director of Dance Theatre of Harlem. In March, the ballet company was in Detroit to premiere a new repertoire when performances were canceled. Johnson called it «devastating.»
Dance Theatre of Harlem might no longer be in a studio 8 hours a day, but they’re holding company classes and rehearsals online from home including ballet class, pointe for women, conditioning and yoga. «We do a lot of strengthening, and it’s very stationary,» said dancer Lindsey Donnell, whose current dance space is about a 6-by-8 foot area in her New York living room-slash-bedroom. «I’m always trying to look for the positive in these situations, so it has been really interesting… there’s kind of cool ways of finding our center because you can’t fall over. You really have to become body aware.»
In March, American Ballet Theatre was wrapping up a weekend of performances in California and set to be on tour for a month before heading home to an 80th anniversary spring season when it was put on hold. Now, the world-renowned company is also holding classes every day on Zoom.
«It was definitely challenging,» said principal dancer Christine Shevchenko, who acknowledged never having taken more than a week off. When quarantine started at first, she was using the kitchen counter as a barre. «I had to redo everything completely because I’ve never worked from home.

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