CLEVELAND, Ohio – Zoom isn’t just for meetings anymore. Now, apparently, it’s also a medium for creating dance.
Just ask Antonio Morillo, a dancer with Cleveland’s Verb Ballets. He and his colleagues this week are about to perform “World of Another,” a new piece they learned entirely online in a new effort to avoid travel and keep safe.
The work is one of three on a virtual program called “Contemporary Creations.”
“I was a little skeptical at first, but she [the choreographer] knew exactly what she wanted,” Morillo said. “It was definitely a challenge.”
The setup was that of any virtual meeting. Choreographer Stephanie Martinez and an assistant operated at spaces in Chicago. Morillo and friends, meanwhile, worked at Verb’s studio in Shaker Heights.
The link between them was a pair of computers, one set up at each location. Verb also affixed its unit with a fisheye lens, so Martinez and her assistant could see all 14 dancers or smaller subsets at once.
In that way, Martinez and assistant modeled the movement they sought, gradually amassing 20 minutes of dance. Martinez also sometimes used diagrams Morillo described as similar to those drawn by football coaches on the sidelines.
“That was something I’d never seen,” Morillo recalled. “But it made things easier to visualize.”
Another thing that helped: having a solid grasp on the choreographer’s artistic goals. It wasn’t just about making shapes, Morillo said. There was a story to tell, too.
An experienced choreographer and the director of Para.Mar Dance Theatre, a Chicago company founded during the pandemic, Martinez allowed the dancers to feed off their own experiences and feelings as they depicted the way we all follow different life paths and often remain ignorant of what others are going through.
“It’s a lot about that idea, and the movement stemmed from that,” Morillo said. “She really has her thumb on a lot of issues and ideas we wanted to explore. With her, we got the best of both worlds.”
Like most artistic experiments, the Zoom creation of “World of Another” had its pluses and minuses.
On the one hand, Morillo said, the process was quite efficient. No time was wasted. On the other, the work was tough, and the finer qualities of their instructor’s movements were lost on a webcam.
Morillo – a choreographer in his own right – said he still prefers to develop new pieces in person, whether he’s creating or dancing.
But there was merit to the experiment, he said, above and beyond the artistic experience Martinez crafted. Now Verb knows it can create online. It can produce new work with perfect social distancing.
“We want to be as safe as possible, and make sure people coming into our space feel safe as well,” Morillo said. “It’s all about their comfort level.”
PREVIEW
Verb Ballets
What: “Contemporary Creations”
When: Viewable for 48 hours beginning 7 p.m. Friday, May 14
Where: verbballets.org
Tickets: $10-$25. Go to verbballets.org or call 216-397-3757.
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Verb Ballets takes creation online, learns new work virtually - cleveland.com
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