Ballet in a Box: Iso-Ballet, Lockdown, and the Reconstruction of the Domestic Space

Abstract

In the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, the principal mitigation strategies were physical distancing and the dramatic restriction of socializing with others. The absence of live performances meant arts institutions had to reconsider their relationship with audiences and thoroughly rethink what they do. While many institutions uploaded videos of past performances, some dance companies created new performances specifically for online media that have provided an opportunity for dancers to remain active and visible during the COVID lockdowns. We borrow the term iso-dance to collectively refer to these performances, a term that succinctly invokes both the medium (dance) and the conditions under which the performance is conducted (isolation). We examine how performances of ballet dancers from professional companies were informed by the home environment. We propose the examination of iso-ballet helps us understand relationships between video, bodily movement and the particular affordances of the home, as well as invite us to question the ways we inhabit and constitute places through creative, bodily practices.

 

COVID-19初期的主要应对措施, 是保持距离和尽量限制社交。现场演出的禁止, 意味着艺术团体必须重新考虑与观众的关系、彻底重新思考其工作。许多艺术团体上传了之前的演出视频, 一些舞蹈公司还在网络媒体创作了新的演出, 为舞者在COVID-19封锁期间保持活跃度和关注度提供了机会。我们将这些演出统称为“隔离舞蹈”, 以简洁地涵盖媒介（舞蹈）和演出条件（隔离）。我们研究了住宅环境如何影响专业公司芭蕾舞演员的演出。我们认为, 对“隔离芭蕾舞”的研究, 有助于理解视频、身体活动和住宅条件之间的关系, 并通过创造性身体行为去质疑我们占据和构建场所的方式。

 

Durante la primera oleada de la pandemia del COVID-19, las principales estrategias de mitigación fueron el distanciamiento físico y la dramática restricción de socializar con los demás. La ausencia de actuaciones escénicas en directo significó que las instituciones de arte tuvieran que reconsiderar lo que hacían. Si bien muchas de las instituciones subieron videos de actuaciones anteriores, algunas compañías de baile montaron nuevas actuaciones destinadas específicamente a los medios en línea, que han proporcionado a los bailarines la oportunidad de continuar activos y visibles durante los encierros por el COVID. Tomamos en préstamo la expresión iso-danza para referirnos colectivamente a estas representaciones, una expresión que de modo sucinto invoca tanto al medio (la danza) como las condiciones bajo las cuales se conduce la actuación (aislamiento). Examinamos cómo el entorno hogareño pudo influir en las actuaciones de los bailarines de ballet de las compañías profesionales. Proponemos que el examen del iso-ballet nos ayude a entender las relaciones entre vídeo, el movimiento corporal y las posibilidades particulares del hogar, igual que nos invite a cuestionar las formas como habitamos y construimos lugares por medio de prácticas creativas y corpóreas.

Key Words:

• ballet
• choreography
• home
• movement

 :

• 芭蕾舞
• 编舞
• 住宅
• 活动

 :

• ballet
• coreografía
• hogar
• movimiento

In the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, the principal mitigation strategies were physical distancing and the dramatic restriction of socializing with others. Arts institutions were among the first to shut down as they are not considered essential services, despite the fact that they often support or initiate responses to social crises (Bailey 2020). Lockdown has been particularly devastating for the performing arts which depend on live performances and the gathering of often large audiences in indoor spaces (Caust 2020). Due to the absence of live performances, arts institutions had to reconsider their relationship with audiences and thoroughly rethink what they do (Lashua, Johnson, and Parry 2021). In the field of dance, many institutions uploaded videos of past performances, rehearsals and even practice routines onto popular video streaming sites, such as Vimeo and YouTube to maintain the interest of existing audiences and, possibly, engage new audiences. In addition, dance companies also created new performances specifically for online media, providing an opportunity for dancers to remain active, and most importantly visible, during the COVID lockdowns.

The term iso-dance first applied to dance involving bodily isolation, a style that features in hip hop and is promoted by such groups as the iSO Dance Company. However, during the pandemic, it was repurposed to describe online dance performances after the very popular lockdown video by Australian comedian, Magda Szubanski, who performed an amateur dance with health care workers. It has since been used to refer to other lockdown performances in the press, from highland to contemporary dance, particularly in Australia, and we have adopted the term because it succinctly invokes both the medium (dance) and the conditions under which the performance is conducted (isolation), and because there is no other consistent term to describe this new category of dance. Within this broad category of iso-dance, we examine specifically how the home environment shapes performances by professional ballet dancers, which we refer to as iso-ballet. Iso-dancing does not really constitute a genre for it merely refers to any online presentation of dance during lockdown. It has arisen in response to an external circumstance rather than an internal investigation or experiment with form or style. The types of performances cross all genres and differ enormously in their presentation from in-house high quality studio productions by professional dancers to non-professionals performing at home or sometimes at work.

The pandemic changed the way that many people engage with urban spaces, in particular it brought the privacy of the home into the public space of work. Many of us sought to hide our homes from public scrutiny through the use of backgrounds and blurred screens; however, for ballet dancers, this was not an option. To continue to participate in the public space of work, they had to incorporate the home into the performance which presented a range of aesthetic challenges as well as prompting a rethinking of the domestic space as a site for movement. Ballet presents a distinctive framework for such rethinking because the basic tenets of performance are not specific to a place. Ballet has its repertoire, roles, movements, spaces and stylistic consistencies that extend beyond the particular place in which they are performed (Hamera 2006, 71). Experienced dancers can take classes in other countries when travelling due to the common attributes of ballet training, e.g. barre exercises; and ballet audiences are familiar with most of the types of movement (rigorously taught in ballet schools) and roles regardless of the company that performs them. This commonality of movement provides a foundation for interrogating the place of performance, in this case individual homes, and the role of the camera in adapting to such restricted spaces. Ballet exposes many of the limits and affordances of domestic spaces, in particular how they shape movement and structure visibility.

The paper addresses most of the iso-ballet videos produced by mainstream ballet companies that seek to recreate the experience of performing ballet within a domestic setting. The paper does not address online videos of street and popular dance performed during lockdown because these genres have long adapted to video and, irrespective of lockdown provisions, are usually performed outside of purpose-built venues. Moreover, we have excluded ballet videos shot by camera operators in dance venues or outdoor locations to give more salience to the lived experience of ballet dancers in lockdown, where they are required to train and perform within often very restricted spaces. In this respect, the examination of iso-ballet helps us understand the relationship between video, bodily movement and the particular affordances of the home as a work space, as well as invite us to question the ways we inhabit and constitute places through creative, bodily practices.

SITE-SPECIFIC AND SITE-ADAPTIVE PERFORMANCES

Insofar as it is performed within the home and most importantly away from the neutral space of the stage, iso-dance can be considered a type of site-specific performance. Site-specific dance covers a range of creative processes from choreographic practices that physically and phenomenologically respond to a location (Hunter 2015) through to the relocation and adaptation of a performance to suit a specific location (Kloetzel 2017; Wilkie 2012; Kwon 1997). In all cases, site-specific dance examines the ways “topographies, fixtures, buildings, other humans and nonhumans, and a host of other affordances inspire choreographers” and shape the performance (Edensor and Bowdler 2015, 709). The specificity of the site raises questions about the interaction of the performers with the space, the mobility and translatability of dance (Kloetzel 2017), and how sites resonate with particular social issues; that is, the “discursive features” of choreographic practice (Kwon 1997; see also Otake 2009). The dancer cannot simply perform the choreography because the choreography arises through the intentional engagement with a variable environment. In addressing the uniqueness of the location, the dancer proposes general ideas about what it means to occupy such places.

From the late 1990s, geographers and others exploring spatial theory have been drawn to the way dance reveals and shapes the spaces through which human bodies move: “spaces are—at least in part—as moving bodies do” (McCormack 2008, 1823; see also Cresswell 2006, Thrift 1997). Our movements are conditioned by lived environments, but we also shape the environment through our movements. As David Seamon argues, our habitual, quotidian movements cohere to form “place ballets” that become the foundation for a sense of place (1979, 56):

In place ballet, space becomes place through interpersonal, spatio-temporal sharing. Human parts create a larger place-whole. The meaning of the whole is normally expressed indirectly – through day-to-day meetings and implicit sense of participation. (Seamon 1979, 59)

A place becomes associated with common movements: people will adopt constrained movements in the confines of a kitchen, and adapt to the flow of people on a busy city street. Homes as sites for performance do not readily accommodate dance movement, nor do they easily accommodate both camera and performer. To be a dance performer in the home requires some negotiation of these spaces for the purposes of practice and performance. The movement of trained dancers within the domestic space must acknowledge how we commonly use such places—couches for sitting, benches for leaning against or preparing food—while rethinking movement in such spaces. As we observe performers sitting on couches, interacting with their children, dancing in the kitchen or on balconies, we are simultaneously drawn to the familiarity of the scene and the unfamiliarity of seeing ballet movements performed in such a place. We see them respond to the limits of their environment: the living room with a low ceiling, the backyard without the sprung floor, or the confines of a corridor or door. Thus, in iso-ballet, we see the performance through the physical and conceptual constraints of domesticity and, in doing so, also reflect upon the very idea of the domestic space as a place ballet.

This involves interaction with the domestic space and rituals, and also a rethinking of that space aesthetically. The dancer has to imagine how they will be viewed by others within the affordances of that space, and for ballet dancers, this is radically different to typical performance spaces. Unlike the openness of the stage, the performers are always framed by the architectural features of the domestic space, from door frames to windows and benches. This changes the very nature of the idea of virtuosity because the body cannot reach the limits of extension and movement. In addition, the dancers must view these domestic spaces through the camera lens, beyond simply documenting a performance in the home. The camera has to fit within the space, which creates an aesthetics of closeness and intimacy that differs from the types of intimacy found on stage. This brings iso-ballet within the realm of dance film, a discipline that appears under a number of guises and names, from videodance to screendance. Melanie Kloetzel argues that the dance film differs from site-specific dance inasmuch as the audience does not travel to the location of the performance and, therefore, does not fully experience the sensory conditions of the site. Nevertheless, the viewer is often able to see the performance in greater detail due to the proximity of the camera (2016, 22). The camera can also adopt numerous positions, alter the shot distance and angle, and even move in concert with the dancer. Douglas Rosenberg speaks of the dynamism offered through different camera techniques and how this shapes not only creative practice and how performances are circulated, but also opens up new theoretical frameworks and ways of writing about dance (2016, 2). Despite the differences in the occasion of viewing, what joins dance film to site-specific dance is that both take the performance away from the familiar space of the stage and disrupt the emphasis on frontality (Kloetzel 2016, 23). Rosenberg (2016) points to the work of screendance pioneers, such as Yvonne Rainer and Bruce Nauman, who turned consideration of what entails site-specific dance to that of the body itself, and where “the screen is the point of reception for the viewer, the point of encounter, and the record of the activity” (9). Both the screen and the camera are sites that change the conditions for viewing and performing. Iso-ballet may be able to maintain many movements common to ballet, yet, it struggles to recreate the frontality of stage performances while adapting to the proximity of the camera and the closeness of surfaces (walls, doors, ceilings and floors).

Iso-ballet performances must also consider new ways of engaging an audience’s attention, as simply uploading staged performances will only appeal to a few in a media environment that privileges concise and short events; hence the popularity of apps, such as TikTok. The iso-ballet video must compete with numerous other videos available online, from the endless procession of comedy shorts to recorded concert performances and other dance genres, as well as with the continuous streams of new information issuing from other social media apps. The availability of dance on video, as Sherril Dodds argues, can mean that digital viewing is less conducive to enduring attention than earlier film and video—watching one dance easily segues into watching a range of other dances. Moreover, online viewing also decontextualises dance from the sites of production and display (2019, 144). Likewise, Marisa Zanotti suggests that online viewers often do not finish watching a video and expect shorter works that can continually provoke interest (2019, 150). Consequently, iso-ballet performances are very short, with most around 3 or 4 min, without the usual narrative and aesthetic development of a stage performance, and often use novel concepts to attract new audiences in addition to the usual subscribers.

THE SCREEN AS AN AESTHETIC CONSTRAINT

How does iso-ballet fit within a taxonomy of dance on film? Does it simply record performances by individuals within the home, similar to the recording of stage performances, or does it constitute a new type of dance with its own choreographic and visual logic? Addressing such questions depends on understanding the aesthetic function of the screen and the camera’s role in imposing constraints on the performance. Hilary Preston argues that dance on film includes any type of performance in which living bodies are the main vehicle for movement. Unlike staged choreographic performances, film and video performances can also develop choreography through camera movement, visual repetition and montage (2006, 85). Douglas Rosenberg uses the expression “screendance” to refer to the use of filmic techniques to choreograph movements that extend beyond the limits of human movement, and so question the commonsense spatial and temporal conditions of corporeal movement. This reimagining of the body stands in strong contrast with that of the filmed stage productions in which the main function is to document a performance (2012, 55).

Where should iso-ballet be placed within this schema? Self-filmed iso-ballet does not readily fit the category of screendance with its emphasis on film techniques and is in many respects closer to the notion of the documented performance. Most of the performances document the virtuosity of the performers within the particular conditions of the home environment rather than recorporealize the dancing body or find radically new forms of performance that depend on film techniques. Most iso-ballet videos showcase the performers from an individual company, for example, the Opéra National de Paris’s =RestezChezVous (2020) and The National Ballet of Canada’s Dancing in Isolation (2020), or highlight the general plight of dancers in lockdown, as in Swans for Relief (2020) and the Swan Lake Bath Ballet (2020). Even those performances with an overarching choreography, such as Birmingham Royal Ballet’s Home from Home: Or Else We Are Lost (2020), are still very short and more concerned with articulating the experience of living in lockdown than in developing themes specific to dance on film. Editing techniques and the mise en scène are used to show as much of the dancers’ movements as possible within the confines of the domestic space. Rather than create fundamentally new works, the videos show dancers at work under lockdown and, in doing so, recapture the sense of a ballet company or community. Although isolated, the individual dancers are not practicing alone because each shares the common experience of lockdown in which the home becomes a new site for both performance and work. In addition, the overall composition of these individual performances ensures that each dancer in their individual home space is connected to other dances in the company through bodily movements choreographed to music that gives coherence within and cross these various homes spaces.

Although the videos largely document performers in the home, the spatial restrictions associated with filming within the home and the difficulties of self-filming lead to quite novel performances. The home as a site for dwelling create spaces with clear functions; bedrooms, bathrooms and kitchens are usually separated and provoke particular types of movement. In the kitchen, individuals usually stand or sit at high benches, whereas in the living room, individuals are more likely to sit, as everything is organised around the lower points of chairs, televisions and coffee tables. These places are much more constrained than a stage because performers cannot readily modify the architectural features or the size of these rooms, which means that they have to either find a space that allows them to move freely, or incorporate the architectural features into the performance. In addition, the presence of a camera also places constraints on the viewing position and therefore on the performance. In films of stage performances, a dedicated director or cameraperson can move the camera to accommodate the lateral or vertical movement of the performer. In these settings, dancers only have to attend to the space of the stage, the movement of other dancers and the audience sitting beyond the fourth wall. They are not required to consider the dimensions of the frame within the time of the performance, nor attend to the visual composition of a shot when a camera follows their movement, as it is incidental to the choreography. In contrast, iso-dance performers are often responsible for both the performance and the positioning of the camera, especially when using amateur equipment, such as mobile phones. The dancer must imagine how they will be seen within the confines of the screen; making sure they remain in view while performing or seeking to retain some control over how they negotiate the tight margins between the body and the edge of the frame. Ballet dancers, who normally operate within large productions, cannot use the stage or the position of other performers as their main guide even when the online performance comprises multiple dancers within a split screen. They each must dance in response to their own screen. The performers are tethered to the camera’s viewing position, simultaneously adopting the point of view of the cameraperson and that of the dancer.

Due to the presence of the camera, movement in the domestic space is conceptualised in terms of the framing of the body and principles of composition. Rather than seeing the house as something to be lived in, it is posited as something to be seen in. This does not fit common modes of aesthetizing the home, which often fall between the empty spaces of idealised homes in real estate photos and architectural magazines to the much more commonplace home photos that emphasise the home’s inhabitants. The dancer must perform in response to the orthogonal aspects of the frame, which in turn reproduce the orthogonal features of the rooms. In film and television, directors carefully consider how bodies and architectural features are placed within the rectangle of the screen with actors often required to position themselves against precise marks so they do not disrupt the mise-en-scène. In dance films, the screen is an architectural space and frame with its own particular logic of entrances and exits—the dancers can suddenly enter or exit the frame with only some of the body visible. Due to the tight, restricted framing, the movement of performers in front of a screen in close proximity is more likely to be perceived as an ongoing process that is only momentarily captured by the camera (Rosenberg 2000, 278). In contrast, in a ballet performance, members of the corps may linger at the edge or exit the stage without unduly disrupting the visual composition of centre stage, and indeed the performer’s position relative to the set design is often more important than the coulisses (wings of the stage). Nor does the audience have to consider the height of the auditorium when appraising the performance. In many respects the edges of the stage visually recede to reveal the performance. Moreover, classical ballet is choreographed for the stage with a large corps of dancers and performed for a live audience sitting at a distance and engaging this audience entails gestural breadth and significant energy in movement. Indeed, most of the movements deemed to be virtuosic entail considerable elevation or horizontal displacement, such as le grande jeté or partnered lifts (Calvo-Merino et al. 2008, 917). Young ballet dancers are taught in class to project beyond their movement and even the studio to an (imagined) audience, to be a “generous” dancer, in a way that radiates outwards to the back row of a theatre in clearly articulated and visible gestures. Consequently, in iso-ballet, the transition from the stage to the home requires a rethinking of the gestural possibilities of the discipline with greater attention to the body’s orientation relative to the frame and the relationship between onscreen and offscreen spaces.

FRAMING THE PERFORMANCE

How the body and home are seen in video is affected by the orientation of the rectangular screen, and the two most common formats are landscape, which emphasizes the horizontal line and is commonly used in film and television, and portrait, which highlights the vertical and is often used in photography and phone applications. The portrait view has always been popular in photography and has been used more frequently in video since the introduction of the smartphone because it is much easier to hold the phone vertically when using one hand. Although some of the new social media applications endorse this orientation, the main video streaming applications, Vimeo and YouTube, have long favored the landscape orientation (Ryan 2018, 255). Most iso-ballet videos are shot with smartphones using both portrait and landscape formats, although the projected format is usually landscape to suit the video streaming sites. The vertical image is either pillarboxed for display with black bands or a blurred image on either side, or multiple images are combined in a split screen. Homes are usually wider than they are tall and are generally better accommodated by the landscape format—one can see the width of the room without the intrusion of a foreshortened ceiling or floor. In contrast, the portrait format works well when recording the performance of a single dancer because the upright frame aligns with the structure of a standing human body, although when filming a group of performers, the landscape structure is more common. The choice of orientation is also linked to short distance—the distance of the subject from the camera and the degree to which the body occupies the frame. In the confined interior spaces of a house or apartment, cameras have to be close to the performers (as they have a short shot distance) which means that less of the body can be visible within the frame. In a close-up in the landscape format, the frame will only include the head of a person whereas in a medium shot, the person is visible from the waist up. In a small house or apartment, the camera operator will find it more difficult to use full shots, in which the whole of the body is visible. The portrait orientation changes this dynamic, for a medium shot could accommodate the whole body with very little space remaining to the left and right of the figure.

The respective benefits of using portrait and landscape orientations within confined locations is clearly demonstrated in the iso-ballet, Swans for Relief (2020), a collection of 32 performances by ballerinas from various dance companies across the world of Mikhail Fokine’s Le Cygne set to Camille Saint-Saëns music from the Carnival of the Animals. When Hannah O’Neill performs on a balcony overlooking the sea, the strong horizontals of the landscape format align with the horizon and the roof of the balcony. As it is a medium shot (usually comprising face and torso), we can only see the upper arm movements mimicking the swan’s wing while the pas de bourrées remain below the frame (Copeland and Phillips 2020, 0:00:24–0:00:36). To incorporate more of the body from such a distance requires a moving camera, as in the opening performance from Misty Copeland, in which the camera begins with a medium to close shot of the feet and then moves up through the body to end with a close-up of the face (0:00:25–0:00:23). However, many of the performers do not have the benefit of an experienced camera operator and had to self-film using a fixed camera. Ako Kondo, in the very confined space of an apartment, requires the portrait view to create a full shot of the body as long as she remains in position. The camera is also placed at a low angle to compress the body into the horizontal (0:03:27–0:03:37). This low angle brings the roof into view and, when combined with a wide-angle lens, bends the vertical lines of the door. We do not just see the dancer perform at home, the short shot distance brings the viewer into the contracted space of the home. This is also a feature of The Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s Angels in the Architecture, which mostly comprises performances using a static camera in portrait mode (although often in slightly wider formats) that are loosely held together in large ensemble landscape shots. In the opening sequence (Godden and Burns 2020, 0:00:20–0:1:24), the dancers are placed in a kneeling position, which makes it much easier to fit the whole body into the image, although many of the dancers still break the frame when shifting to seated positions with the legs splayed. To accommodate the landscape format, Angels in the Architecture and Swans for Relief, as well many other iso-ballet performances, arrange the portrait images in pairs to form a split screen, which creates a form of ensemble performance in which the dancers respond to the same music without operating in the same choreographic space. While we might see the performers dancing in unison, the split screen also reveals the differences between each home—the type of site might be common but the particular manifestation is quite variable.

In general, when the landscape format is used to film dance in the home, the spatial environment plays a larger role within the overall composition, and this can be incorporated into the filmmaking. The Dutch National Ballet’s Hold On (2020; music, Hold On, by the band Di-rect) uses phone footage filmed by the dancers, their partners or friends, and as such is subject to the same constraints as other performances, but under the direction of choreographer Milena Sidorova and editor Altin Kaftira, the home is deliberately invoked in the design and choreography. Many dancers perform floor work and adopt non-upright postures to fit the narrow horizontal limits of the landscape format. In the opening shot, a dancer sits cross-legged and swaying before a couch in a low angle shot. Here the couch fills the horizontals of the landscape format and frames the dancer in a symmetrical composition. The seated posture allows the medium shot to take in the whole of the dancer’s body, which is also used in subsequent shots with a dancer sitting on the edge of a low-slung couch-bed, and another lying upside down on the couch facing the camera (Sidorova and Kaftira 2020, 0:00:00–0:00:06). When the bodies are cropped, the editing and choreography carefully attends to the composition of the shot: a dancer’s head is isolated from the body in a close-up with the hair splayed to fill the negative space with the only movement a simple glance (0:00:08–0:00:11), a dancer’s legs project up the wall, or are shown moving in isolation against a Marley mat—the deliberateness of the composition is confirmed by the repetition of the movement by another dancer in the succeeding shot (0:00:14–0:00:17). The choreography works with the screen orientation, the short distances between camera and performer, and the demands of the site—the dancers do not remove the couch to perform, they just work it into the composition.

The camera cannot pull away from the dancers and the tightness of the shots highlights the constriction of the domestic space in which bodies are enclosed by walls, furniture and doors. This constriction is overcome in film and television through the use of sound stages where the camera can move around at a distance beyond the fourth wall. This tightness also derives from the particular way the camera lens organizes space, with most lenses cutting off much of the space we would see in our peripheral vision when standing at the same distance—the longer the focal length the narrower the field of view. Merce Cunningham noted the limitations when choreographing for screen, stating that in video the narrow space in the foreground widens to the background, whereas in a live performance the audience sees the stage narrowing toward the background (Maletic 1987, 4). If an audience member sits in the front rows, s/he would find it difficult see the edges of the stage while looking centrally at the performance. Dodds (2001, 30) notes that a dancer on television who is close to the screen will move out of view with very little movement, whereas a dancer in the background has a much wider sphere of movement before exiting the frame. The proximity of the camera to most of the performances in the iso-ballets does not give the performers much room for lateral movement. This cropping of the visual space also means that dancers can enter the space of performance from behind the camera rather than from the wings. Irrespective of how much of a performance is visible within the shot, the tightness and narrowing of the foreground highlights the relationship between the dancer and the edge of the frame and gestures toward the occluded offscreen space.

Offscreen space, like its onscreen counterpart, derives its value from the way bodies move relative to the edge of the frame. The film theorist, Noël Burch, divides off-screen space into six “segments”: the first four correspond to the spaces just outside each of the four borders of the frame (left, right, top and bottom); the fifth to the space behind the camera, and the sixth to hidden spaces within the set, that is, characters disappearing behind objects (doors, and so on) (1981, 17). The relationship between offscreen and onscreen space is also informed by the ground and gravity—moving vertically and laterally are quite different propositions. The offscreen areas to the left and right correspond to the movement of bodies along the horizontal line and thus satisfy the condition for exits (Burch 1981, 18), whereas moving into the top segment without a prop, such as a stair would imply the character can levitate, and to move into the bottom of the frame would suggest a character going below ground, again only feasible if the ground contains stairs, a hole, or an embankment. In iso-ballets, which do not have the freedom of a film set, the viewer sees the various segments of offscreen space through the affordances of the home and the idea of moving into certain segments, such as the top or bottom of the frame is deemed unlikely due to the presence of ceilings and floors—the home does not have the considerable height of a stage and the viewer would not expect traps.

Most of the iso-ballet performances look for ways to accommodate the dancing body within the narrow field of vision. However, some make use of the edge of the frame as an aesthetic device because it is always so proximate to the body within confined spaces and short shot distances. In the Opéra National de Paris’s =RestezChezVous (2020; set to music from Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet), the director, Cédric Klapisch, carefully attends to this relationship between offscreen and onscreen space in the choice of shots. We are first introduced to the dancers in a series of medium shots, mostly using the portrait format. The dancers appear very close to the edge of the frame due to the shot distance, which also separates them from the particularity of the location just visible in the background (Klapisch 2020, 0:00:08–0:00:25). This changes when the main theme from Prokofiev’s “Dance of the Knights” begins, showing the variety of places in which the dancers practice during lockdown from stairwells to kitchens, and even young children following the parents around as they perform. In one particularly striking shot, the bare feet of a dancer appear to jostle with the floor before moving up onto the toes with the torso and arms unseen in the offscreen space. Remarkably, the feet rise to the tips of the toes without being en pointe, and the movement continues with the feet leaving the ground and exiting via the top segment of the frame (Klapisch 2020, 0:02:12–0:02:19). The movement is unexpected because human bodies do not usually exit the frame vertically, as this implies levitation. In this case, the body is probably being hoisted up by the arms on kitchen benches, but as we cannot see the full body, the activity in the offscreen space remains ambiguous.

Using props and internal architectural features creates offscreen spaces within the mise en scène and can occlude parts of the body and highlight others, unlike stage performances showing the whole body or the interaction between multiple bodies. Burch (1981, 21) states that objects and bodies crossing the threshold of the frame operate in two spaces at the same time. The close-up of a hand will metonymically refer to the whole of the body invisible in the off-screen space or a character might signal their presence by simply poking their head out from a door. In one segment from =RestezChezVous, a dancer moves her hands from an upright position, only to reveal another set of arms in the same initial position, where another dancer occupies the space behind the performer (Klapisch 2020, 0:02:12–0:02:19). Internal offscreen space is also used in a shot where three dancers project their legs into the air with their torsos hidden by the footboard of a bed, which isolates the legs from the expressiveness of the face (0:02:41–0:02:47). In an earlier shot, a dancer gracefully moves her arms while hiding her torso to the right of the camera—the expressive gestures of dance here become figures in a shadow puppet play (0:02:58–0:03:01). Due to the constriction of the locations and the tightness of the shots, the dancers seek ways to manipulate the spaces to create drama in lieu of the typical virtuosity displayed on the stage. The performers demonstrate a playfulness with the space in the lockdown period, and the screen becomes a means of reshaping this space and rethinking the nature of balletic performance.

This emphasis on the isolated gesture features in one of the most popular of the iso-ballets, the Swan Lake Bath Ballet, choreographed by the New Zealand choreographer Corey Baker under a commission from the BBC as part of its Culture in Quarantine series. Although the performance is filmed by the dancers in their own homes, the work has a definite aesthetic unity due to Baker’s choreography, the visual composition (in particular the use of the split screen), and the graphic matches in the editing. The dancers also used a common application on their phones to ensure a consistent quality across each of the segments (Wiegand 2020). In the opening sequence, a bathtub is placed horizontally at eye-level to the camera and surrounded by candles from which appear the arms and legs of the dancer (later revealed to be Viktorina Kapitonova) performing a series of gestural movements placed in relief by the edge of the bathtub (Baker 2020, 0:00:06–0:00:18). Unlike most stage performances, the hands, legs and feet are separated from the dancer’s head and torso, which are sequestered in an offscreen space within the bathtub. This use of offscreen space and relatively close shot distance accentuates the gestures and gives them a prominence comparable to a dancer’s whole body on stage. Notably, much of the movement responds to the famous music from Swan Lake and makes use of iconic tropes from other Swan Lake productions: the fluttering of hands, crossing of wrists, pas de bourrées, rippling arm movements like wings, legs pointing upwards like the necks of swans and the feet bending forward to create their aquiline heads, although with some comic twists, such as the flattening out of the heels. In another set of sequences (0:00:57–0:01:19), a dancer’s legs jut out of the bathtub and perform a series of movements that resemble the contraction of frogs’ legs, which is further accentuated by the use of split screen reproductions. Movements of the feet are always balanced with gestures of the hand, and it is only when the body is disarticulated by the frame that the foot or hand can truly become the head of a swan.

An indoor space itself is a form of frame or box with walls and doorframes creating internal divisions between on and offscreen space—to move in or out of a doorway is also to move in and out of the frame. The appearance of iso-dancers dually framed by both the rectangle of the screen and the various architectural rectangles of the home creates an aesthetic more germane to modern ballet and dance than classical ballet [such as the dance of the queen before a mirror in Ballet Preljocaj’s (2008) Blanche Neige and the two performers dancing within a rotating cube decorated like a room in the Netherland Dance Theater’s (2009) Sehnsucht]. In the Dutch National Ballet’s Hold On, many of the performances focus on the relationship between a dancer and a wall, which figuratively refers to isolation and literally to weight and resistance. In one sequence from Hold On, a dancer touches the wall to the right from a crouched position, the next shot shows another dancer in a sitting position touching a wall from the left with the implication that they are touching either side of the same wall. She stands up and her hand slides up the wall, which is followed by a shot of the first dancer also now standing against the wall. This becomes a recurring motif, as the shots segue to other dancers touching walls to indicate the offscreen space (Sidorova and Kaftira 2020, 0:00:24–0:00:39). This attention to the intervening wall has been used in earlier video dance performances including Dawn Kramer’s short dance film My Place or Yours (1985), where two performers inhabiting adjoining flats cleave to the wall that separates them, which is like a form of elastic drawing them back to a physical feature as well as a clear division between onscreen and offscreen space. The wall becomes a feature of many iso-ballet performances because it is drawn into the frame, and this provokes interest in the space beyond the wall.

GESTURAL BREADTH AND CONFINED SPACES

Visually, the body is a physical mass that articulates a clear volume in space—we can see where the body begins and ends in the outlines of the skin, hair and costume. However, the body can also occupy space through movement and gesture—the implied and actual movement of bodies delineates the surrounding space giving it both a corporeal and affective form (Atkinson and Duffy 2019, 25). The choreographer and dance theorist, Rudolf Laban sought to give this attendant space a clear conceptual form by referring to it as the “kinesphere”:

The kinesphere is the sphere around the body whose periphery can be reached by easily extended limbs without stepping away from that place which is the point of support when standing on one foot, which we shall call the “stance.” We are able to outline the boundary of this imaginary sphere with our feet as well as with our hands. (Laban 1966, 10)

In this schema, the stance serves as the pivot for the articulation of the kinesphere, and each time the body moves from one stance to another, it creates a new kinesphere. As a means of simplifying the description, Laban describes the kinesphere in terms of the various embodied dimensions: length, breadth and depth—that create a series of rectangles around the body—which correspond up and down, left and right, forwards and backwards, respectively (1966, 11). There are certainly problems with such a conception when it comes to the analysis of movement and gesture, for why not begin with movement rather than a delimited space? However, in the investigation of iso-ballet, the kinesphere has very direct relevance, for gesture is clearly limited by the way a body fits into a domestic space and cinematic frame. In self-filming, dancers must imagine their gestures from a fixed position, with a limb providing a point of reference and the room providing props to help delimit the space. Ballet training offers insight into such fixed positions because dancers are taught to dance within their own square, even when part of a corps de ballet. Hamera (2006, 67) argues that ballet dancers are required to think of their body and its movement in terms of squares, from ensuring that hips and shoulders follow the same line to creating 180° lines with the feet. The studio complements this training of the body with its definite organisation in terms of horizontal and vertical planes. For example, en croix divides the square into four smaller squares within a cross and is the primary shape of most barre exercises: en face is to face the front of the square, croisé is to face a corner of your square with legs crossed from the audience’s perspective. The square is an invisible structure that contains most standard movements and enables large groups to move in harmony. Its importance is evident in the fact that many professional dancers were sent one square meter of Marley floor (specific dance flooring used in studios and stages) during the various lockdowns in order for them to safely take class at home. The mats cushion the floor as well as outline a performance space.

The kinesphere is stable in the degree to which the body holds to a particular pivot, and this stability complements the fixed cameras used in many iso-ballet videos. A dancer moving rapidly through a house in the same way that they might move around a stage with broad gestures and runs—in other words creating multiple kinespheres—cannot easily align with a fixed camera or even a moving camera in a medium shot or close-up. To address this visual uncertainty, the dancer can reduce the repertoire of movement by holding the body to a position with one of the limbs. Dancers certainly have training in this, for the most fundamental training device, the barre, holds the body to a space in addition to providing support. When the dancer moves through the barre exercises, the body is always held within a tight kinesphere that emphasizes frontality and restricted horizontal and vertical figures—an aesthetic emphasizing the proper articular of angles, lines, and curves. The barre is essentially a prop that tethers the dancer to a position and can be substituted to some degree by household items (chairs, table and walls). In the Opéra National de Paris’s =RestezChezVous, the main performance begins with a series of movements drawn from barre exercises using a fireplace, bench, ladder, edge of a door, and kitchen table often in the en croix formation (Klapisch 2020, 0:00:25–0:00:42). The dancers generally adopt positions in which they face the camera and remain vertical, from a pas de bourrée in place (the dancer does not glide across the floor) to a ballerina supported by a male dancer. Arielle Miralles (Rose 2020, 0:01:34–0:01:43) uses the balustrade of a stairwell to fix her position with one hand and leg and let the others articulate a series of broad gestures—no variation in length or depth, although there is some allowance for breadth. The need to delimit the gestural boundaries of the kinesphere combines with the proximity of objects within the home to create an aesthetic of containment or tethering.

Another way to limit the gestural excesses of ballet to fit the small space of the screen is to tether the dancer to an internal frame. In a scene from the Paris Opèra Ballet performance, a dancer stands on a window ledge holding onto its edges while projecting the body forward (Klapisch 2020, 0:00:45–0:00:49). The dancer can move in depth, backwards and forwards, while the window frame stops movement in length and breadth. The most notable example of an internal frame to constrain movement is the Swan Lake Bath Ballet. Many of the performances use top down shots in which the body is contained by the bathtub’s edges: a dancer emerges from a bathtub full of feathers; another dancer crouches face down in a tub partially filled with blue-dyed water; a swan skirting the top of a lake. These compositional choices accord with Baker’s use of vertical shots (crane, boom or drone) in other productions, such as Lying Together (2020) and Spaghetti Junction (2020), but it also allows the choreographer to create sequences in which each dancer’s kinesphere is fully circumscribed by the border of the tub. Physical constriction is central to the choreography, which Baker conceived in the shower. The bathroom remained his workspace because he found that the kitchen had too much space and this led to choreographing moves that were too expansive and did not really represent the conditions of lockdown (Wiegand 2020). To accommodate the restriction of the bathtub, the camera had to be fixed: dancers used a range of devices to fix the cameras in position. including attaching them to shower head, sticking them to the ceiling, as well as positioning them using household objects, including a broom handle and toilet plunger (Maddox 2020). The hard edges of the bathtub physically push all movement toward the center, therefore most of the choreographed movements involve pushing toward and away from the bathtub and, from this perspective, draw upon depth and length in Laban’s schema. The back of a torso pushes out of the tub toward the camera and soon contracts back in; legs are thrown upwards with the hands holding the edge of the tub; heads toss back and forth to look down at the water or up at the viewer. The movement up and down replaces the left to right movement of the limbs creating symmetry in each of the performances.

The bathtub is a perfect metonym for domestic life, a metaphor for the lake in the ballet, and a means of tethering the dancer to screen, which is complemented by the fact that it mimics the shape of the mobile phone screen from this top-down perspective. The frame within a frame becomes the new stage. A device that has been used in other videodance performances (for example, Remy Charlip’s 1978 work, Dance in the Bed), in Swan Lake Bath Ballet, the bath serves as a modular visual unit that can be replicated within the standard online video aspect ratio to create a ballet corps—in split screen the tubs form three, four, five and even sixteen units within the frame. The portrait images operate as segments referencing the human figure that easily fit the landscape frame in a way that reproduces the division into four vertical segments of cinematic anamorphic images (Deutelbaum 2003, 72). Dancers are often placed in opposing directions in the bathtub to create a visual as well as corporeal rhythm, such that the ballet becomes an Esther Williams or Busby Berkeley style spectacle (Maddox 2020). Due to the use of equal visual units, symmetry becomes the most obvious compositional principle and dance, which is usually conceived in terms of the depth of the stage, cedes to a two-dimensional structure guided by internal and external frames.

CONCLUSION

What we have called iso-ballet has arisen in response to a social circumstance rather than through a thoroughgoing internal investigation of form or style in either dance or video. The types of performances cross all genres and differ enormously in their presentation from in-house high quality studio productions by professional dancers to non-professionals performing at home or sometimes at work, most commonly health care workers. Even within the much narrower field of ballet, the styles vary from choreographed complete works (Swan Lake Bath Ballet or Home from Home), compilation videos of dancers performing at home with their own choreography (Dancing in Isolation and =RestezChezVous), through to hybrids that modify existing choreography (Swans for Relief and Angels in the Architecture) and even mockumentaries (The Australian Ballet’s Wilis in Corps-en-tine, Scribner and Rowe 2020). Although the styles may be hybrid, varied and even disconnected, the performances demonstrate a certain commonality through their response to the constraints of the site, including the constraints of home filmed video and the constriction of these home spaces for dance.

Unlike performances that take the domestic sphere as a theme, the dancers of iso-ballet have no option but to perform at home. We see them respond to the limits of their environment. On the one hand, the site could be regarded as an intrusion or obstruction that prevents the dancer from fully displaying their technical repertoire because it does not have the openness of a stage or studio. On the other, these constraints contribute to the choreographic development of the discipline, for artistic practice has always been subject to limits: the limits or materials (watercolor, marble, the human body, gravity) and stylistic constraints (poetic devices, musical rhythms), as well as economic and cultural constraints. In iso-ballet, we see the performance through the physical and conceptual constraints of domesticity and, in doing so, also reflect upon the very idea of the domestic space as a place ballet.

Iso-ballet captures the extraordinary agility and grace of members of a ballet company moving within the confines of ordinary and mundane home spaces, thus re-enchanting these spaces through the creation of a sense of intimacy and collectivity (Hylland 2022). This intimacy and collectivity was one way to maintain connection beyond the collective moment of a theatre performance during a period that most us experienced in isolation, living with feelings of uncertainty and fear. In this sense, iso-ballet creates something unique by reaching a compromise between styles of performance designed for the expansiveness of stage ballet and the structural limits of lockdown. In all the performances, dancers and/or choreographers work with the affordances of the home by incorporating walls, benches, bathtubs and couches into the performance; the relationship between offscreen and onscreen space; and also rework existing ballet movements to hold the body in position to suit the demands of video framing. Indeed, iso-ballet finds itself between two sites—the indoor frames of the house and the frame of the screen—and speaks directly to the context of production in a way that could be incorporated into future performances of ballet on screen. Indeed, as Rosenberg (2016, 2) suggests, new technologies, such as smart phones provide new avenues for choreographic practice because of the ways bodies and bodily movement can be placed in relation to the audience. Cameras also change the performers relationship to lived spaces by asking them to reimagine sites of habitual domesticity as screened performance spaces. Iso-ballet, as do screendance and site-specific dance, questions the assumptions inherent in a staged dance performance, and offers ways to rethink the relations between place, body and movement.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors thank the reviewers for their generous comments and helpful suggestions.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul Atkinson

PAUL ATKINSON is a Lecturer in communications and media studies in the School of Media, Film and Journalism at Monash University, Caulfield, Australia. E-mail: [email protected]. He has published widely on a range of media, from cinema and animation to dance and comic books, in addition to his work on philosophy and aesthetics. He is particularly interested in the relationship between time and visual form, which is integral to his recent book on the relationship between Henri Bergson’s vitalist philosophy and visual aesthetics (Henri Bergson and Visual Culture: A Philosophy for a New Aesthetic, 2020).

Michelle Duffy

MICHELLE DUFFY is an Associate Professor in human geography in the School of Environmental and Life Sciences at the University of Newcastle, Newcastle, Australia. E-mail: [email protected]. She is a cultural geographer whose primary research focuses on a deeper understanding of the various ways the human and more-than-human worlds are entangled. She is interested in how these entanglements are expressed through emotion, affect and arts practices, and especially the role sound and movement play in creating, enhancing and challenging these relationships.

Joanne Ailwood

JOANNE AILWOOD is an Associate Professor in early childhood education in the School of Education, at the University of Newcastle, Newcastle, Australia. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research is situated in early childhood education and care. Her work aims to find spaces that help us think in different ways about young children, their education and the relationships between the adults who care for them. To do this she makes use of post-structural theorising, to investigate and challenge some of the “common knowledges” of early childhood education, for example play.