Somewhere between the pliés and tendus, your thighs begin to burn. You’re standing at a makeshift ballet barre (your kitchen counter) in homespun ballet slippers (socks rolled down past your heels, affording you some traction). You’re wearing a shapeless getup—someone would need X-ray vision to tell whether your knees are hyper-extended. This is pandemic ballet class. The barrier to entry is low, and that’s kinda refreshing.
On your laptop, Dustin Crumbaugh, director of education for The Big Muddy Dance Company, is demonstrating the deep bends and leg extensions in a 46-minute-long Beginning Ballet class. In an attempt to keep dancers conditioned and carry on the educational arm of its company during the COVID-19 pandemic, Big Muddy is now offering virtual Zoom classes. A virtual class card runs $60 for 10 classes. A single class is $7.
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Ballet’s beauty is its complexity—at least for beginners. While your mind is busy trying to keep your hips turned out, your spine lengthened, your quadriceps activated, and the movement extending through the arch and ball of your foot—all at once, and what are your arms supposed to be doing again?—the Sunday Scaries are miles away. “Now more than ever, dance has been a really helpful way to channel all those other difficulties and stress that people are going through,” Crumbaugh says. Here, take all our money.
Crumbaugh is finding that his students are connecting emotionally to the movements, in large part because of how he’s modified teaching for Zoom. With the video conferencing software, Crumbaugh was looking to implement a deeper experience—and surprisingly, for an art that’s so physical, it’s been through talking. In person, Crumbaugh works by touch. He can put his hand on a student’s shoulder if he wants the dancer to relax that particular body part. With Zoom, he had to figure out how to do that with words.
“I might cue up a situation where I would feel tension and say, ‘Can you imagine what you feel like when you’re in this situation? Compare it to something like this, where you feel more relaxed and feel how those shoulders drop,’” he describes.
Will Big Muddy continue the online classes after the pandemic ends? Crumbaugh recognizes that could be a way to both extend Big Muddy’s reach into the world and enable the company to offer students instruction outside of St. Louis. “Logistically, [that used to be] tough to achieve,” he says. “You have to find a teacher or a choreographer, make sure that they’re available, pay for their expenses and housing. Suddenly now I just have to send them a link.”
Class Pass
Two ballet classes we mastered in the time of COVID-19
As of press time, Big Muddy is still offering limited in-person classes at its studio space, 3305 Washington, but for those content to turn their living rooms into ballet studios, there are Zoom classes aplenty. The dance company is also offering some pre-recorded classes on its website for people considering virtual options. Here are two we tried.
Longer and Leaner
This 35-minute pre-class exercise begins with movements that activate the toes. Eventually you’ll move into more of a full-body conditioning. What some might consider a warmup counts as an intense exercise to those of us who have basically become one with the sofa during the pandemic.
Beginning Ballet
In this ballet starter pack, you’ll learn basic moves at the barre, eventually venturing to the center of the floor for an adagio—a very slow and controlled (read: you’ll need some balance) set of exercises. The final two movements in the video are turns and jumps. Now we’re getting somewhere.
