Changing Positions: Four dancers who took big steps in a challenging year
By Jenn Edwards
During a tough year for the arts, dance artists are adapting to new challenges and, in many cases, thriving. Four dancers share their 2020 stories, including promotions, first jobs and international moves.
Calvin Royal III — American Ballet Theatre, New York City
For Calvin Royal III, the season began unlike any other. Not only because it’s his first as a principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre — where he has steadily climbed the ladder from student to apprentice to company member — but because the dancers found themselves working together in ballet bubbles at a facility in upstate New York, living, rehearsing and quarantining, thankful to be back in real studios after months of lockdown.
Artistic director Kevin McKenzie’s plan was to promote Royal in spring 2020, and to have him finish the season dancing coveted roles such as Albrecht in Giselle and Romeo. But the pandemic ended the season early, pushing his promotion to the fall. While Royal had been looking forward to such classic leading roles, he had injured his ankle in March, so the lockdown gave him an unexpected chance to rest and recover.
During September and October, inside the bubble, Royal rehearsed Touché, a duet by Christopher Rudd, a Jamaican-born choreographer whose work is a theatrical blend of ballet, modern and contemporary dance. Touché was one of four new creations that streamed in November as part of ABT Today: The Future Starts Now, celebrating the company’s 80th anniversary. The duet centres around male love, a theme that resonates with Royal, who is gay. “Love and lust are universal themes, and to be able to explore them from a gay perspective is something I never thought I’d be a part of at ABT. Having these stories reflected on ABT stages is really exciting,” he says.
Royal has also kept busy working virtually with sought-after New York-based choreographer Kyle Abraham on a solo for the annual Fall For Dance festival. He approached Abraham, a friend of his, about creating a solo set to Ravel’s Bolero. “I told him I had Bolero stuck in my head. With everything going on with Black Lives Matter and the pandemic, threats seemed to be coming from all sides, and this music represents so much of that feeling, with its continuous pulse and movement,” says Royal. They worked from a distance, with Abraham sending him video footage to learn at the end of his long days in rehearsal with ABT. Back in the city, they had one day to rehearse before filming the 15-minute work on stage at New York City Centre. Titled to be seen, the solo premiered as part of the festival’s all-digital format in late October.
Sebastian Fairley — Ballet Victoria, Victoria, BC
When Sebastian Fairley’s first season as a member of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s Aspirant Program for emerging dancers ended abruptly in March due to the pandemic, the 22-year-old flew home to Vancouver unsure of his future as a dancer, and of the arts in general. “Right from the airport, I drove to my grandma’s cabin and camped [on her property] for two months, preparing for the worst,” he says.
But in May, Fairley got a call from Paul Destrooper, artistic and executive director of Ballet Victoria. Because of COVID-19, several international dancers had to return home, and there was a vacancy for a male dancer. He had been recommended to Destrooper by the Aspirant Program director Stephane Léonard. Without hesitation, Fairley took the position, the first of his professional ballet career.
Fairley moved to Vancouver Island to begin rehearsals with the small troupe of 12 at the end of September. The company picked up where they had left off in March, rehearsing for a mixed bill. In Destrooper’s one-act The Little Prince, Fairley jumped in and learned his supporting role, The Business Man, quickly as the show premiered barely a month after his arrival.
When we spoke, Ballet Victoria was deep into rehearsals for The Nutcracker, in which Fairley performs the lead cavalier in the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. Normally, the production tours BC, with children from each community brought on board for the party scene, and additional cast members hired. But because of the pandemic, they will present a condensed one-act Nutcracker, a kind of greatest hits version of the classic holiday show, only in Victoria. They have transformed Kirk Hall, a 5,000-square-foot gym, into a theatre that can accommodate up to 35, with socially distanced audience bubbles of up to six people.
Within the bubble of the small company, the dancers rehearse in close proximity but exercise caution outside of rehearsals, which means severely limiting social engagements. “One misstep and we’d have to take two weeks off,” says Fairley, “and that could derail an entire program.”
Nicole Ward — Nederlands Dans Theater, The Hague, Netherlands
This fall, when Canadian Emily Molnar took over the artistic directorship of Nederlands Dans Theater, she brought along three dancers from Vancouver, where she had been artistic director of Ballet BC. One of them was Nicole Ward.
Born in Bolivia to British and Colombian parents, Ward grew up in Coquitlam, a suburb of Vancouver, and trained at Arts Umbrella, before joining Ballet BC in 2015. It was while on tour in Europe in winter 2019 that Molnar first approached her about the idea of joining NDT l. “I was in pure shock. It’s something I’ve always wanted,” she says. NDT 1 is among the world’s leading contemporary dance companies, attracting top-notch dancers and choreographers from all over.
She arrived in The Hague, NDT’s home base, in July, and finds her short bicycle commute to the studio a welcome change from the daily hour-plus haul between Coquitlam and Vancouver. Her studio routine is also quite different from the steady 9 AM to 6 PM rehearsal schedule she was accustomed to. This is partly because of current COVID restrictions, but also because NDT is a larger company with a wider variety of projects happening at once. Each day is different depending on what they’re working on, and on some days she even has free time.
Working within a company of 25 dancers, some of whom have been there for a decade or two, has been eye-opening for 25-year-old Ward. “Having that knowledge and experience in the room affects how we create and how people are with each other,” she says. “By comparison, Ballet BC is a pretty young company.” This is true both in the average age of the dancers, and the age of the companies themselves: NDT was established in 1959; Ballet BC, in 1986.
Over the past two months, NDT has been in creation for a piece by Yoann Bourgeois, a French choreographer with a circus background. Titled I wonder where the dreams I don’t remember go, it’s set for a live-streamed premiere December 3-5.
Tigran Mkrtchyan — Boston Ballet, Boston, MA
Back in studio since September, Boston Ballet company members have been taking weekly COVID tests and wearing masks in rehearsals. They work in pods of no more than 10 dancers, which has shaped their winter programming in an interesting way. The Gift, live-streaming December 17-27, is a clever deconstruction of The Nutcracker, made up of short works choreographed by seven company dancers — “pod captains,” as newly promoted principal dancer Tigran Mkrtchyan calls them — set to tracks from Duke Ellington’s jazz album, The Nutcracker Suite. For the show’s finale, Mkrtchyan is partnering with Viktorina Kapitonova in the only piece pulled from artistic director Mikko Nissinen’s version of the beloved classic, the grand pas de deux from Act II.
Mkrtchyan’s promotion to principal came right before Boston Ballet’s season abruptly ended in March due to COVID. Rather than waiting out the lockdown in the United States, he left for Zürich, where case numbers remained low. Mkrtchyan feels a strong connection to Switzerland, having spent ten years at Ballet Zürich prior to moving to the US. Over the spring and summer, he worked with a few former colleagues, including choreographer Filipe Portugal, whose Orphée et Eurydice duet, set on him and former Ballet Zürich dancer Yen Han, premiered at the Odessa Classics Festival in the Ukraine in June to reduced audiences.
Mkrtchyan is from Yerevan, Armenia, where he attended the Armenian Ballet School before training at Zürich Dance Academy in Switzerland and working his way up to soloist at Ballet Zürich. Craving a bigger, more classical company, he joined Boston Ballet as a soloist in 2019. “It was always my dream from a young age to visit the US, or live there, so when I had my chance I took it.” One of his favourite things about the US is hip hop culture — Mkrtchyan is also a rap artist, recording music in his spare time.
Tags: American Ballet Theatre Ballet Victoria Boston Ballet Calvin Royal III Christopher Rudd COVID-19 dancers of colour international dance news Kyle Abraham lockdowns male dancers Mikko Nissinen Nederlands Dans Theater Nicole Ward Sebastian Fairley Tigran Mkrtchyan