1. Robbie Fairchild’s #roofseries
Possibly the best thing to come out of lockdown. Ex-New York City Ballet dancer turned Broadway and Cats star Robbie Fairchild dancing on his Manhattan rooftop with his flatmate, dancer/choreographer Chris Jarosz. Watch this to feed on their alfresco freedom. Fairchild is an electric dancer and the juicy energy is both slack and taut, masculine and feminine, low slung and light-footed. It’s very cool and very now.
2. Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
Alvin Ailey’s most famous work, Revelations, gets a lockdown edit, splicing together the dancers performing a short excerpt at home. The settings couldn’t be more busily domestic: furniture and fridge magnets, indifferent flatmates and curious dogs. But, as the hum of the spiritual I Been Buked rises, the dancers arms stretch into a low V, faces upturned to the heavens, and they briefly transcend the everyday. Another clip, of Rennie Harris’s Lazarus, features funky house footwork for immediate uplift.
3. Alexander Whitley: Digital Body
If you know what to do with an .fbx file, this one’s for you. Choreographer Alexander Whitley was due to premiere his latest work, Overflow, last weekend, but he’s now musing on digital choreography instead. He’s released a series of motion capture improvisations and is sharing all the digital files so that anyone – designers, composers, digital artists – can create a response. Trippy visuals ahoy!
4. Ivan Vasiliev and the Mikhailovsky Ballet
Stars of Moscow’s Mikhailovsky Ballet offer a domestic take on some of the great ballets, led by Ivan Vasiliev, a mighty virtuoso dancer with an endearing silly streak. He enacts Giselle with his wife, the Bolshoi’s Maria Vinogradova, while she cooks lunch, Valeria Zapasnikova does Don Q with a dinner plate for a fan, and Ella Persson’s Cinderella, alas, really cannot go to the ball this time.
5. Francesca Hayward and Cesar Corrales
The lockdown has put paid to one big date in the ballet diary, Francesca Hayward’s debut in Swan Lake, but she and partner Cesar Corrales are keeping their muscles warm. The videos are only a matter of seconds long but it’s worth it for the joy on Hayward’s face as Corrales spins her in dizzying multiple pirouettes, her smile getting wider with each turn. A treat to see dancers out of character, just loving dancing.
