Watch NY'd BalletCollective's 'Natural History' live from your car

Have you ever watched a ballet from your car? The ballet, Natural History, has to be the most inventive response to the performance restrictions of 2020. Dancers from New York City Ballet and Martha Graham Dance Company have come together with BalletCollective’s artistic team to present a new ballet for drive-in and tailgate audiences in Pine Plains, NY September 10-12, a two hour drive from NYC. A limited audience will also be able to secure socially-distanced lawn seating and the ballet will also be available in more conventionally social-distancing, live-streamed performances.

Reservations for the live performances are free (contributions are encouraged) and can be made here. The live-stream will be available here. 

Natural History is choreographed by BalletCollective founder and director, Troy Schumacher, to a score by his frequent collaborator, Ellis Ludwig-Leone, and is based on commissioned poems by contributing artist, Carey McHugh. The ballet is about memory and loss, portrayed in before and after sequences inspired by the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic and a reimagination of the future of concert dance. To develop the poems, music and dance for the ballet, creative team visited the Museum of Natural History in New York before it closed due to Covid, conferred with the director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Columbia University on the mechanics of memory and the memory of their visit to the museum and added experiences from the early days of Covid.

It features New York City Ballet dancers, Anthony Huxley; Ashley Laracey; Lorenzo Pagano; Erica Pereira; Devin Alberda and Davide Riccardo; and Martha Graham Dance Company dancers, Lorenzo Pagano and Leslie Andrea Williams. The group self-quarantined for two weeks before commencing and the four-week rehearsal period was closed to the outside world.

- CANDIDE MCDONALD