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On the Road With Ballet Theater. Who Needs Red Velvet Seats.


Mostly, they grew accustomed enough to tour life to complain a bit about the sameness. (In St. Louis, the distribution of tour swag got them excited again.) Usually, touring dancers have to adjust to a different stage in each town, but since they brought their own this time, it was always familiar — bouncy, if sometimes hot.

Where to put that stage was trickier. At the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, where the dressing room was in the Bee and Pollinator Discovery Center next to the red barn, the ground sloped from the stage so as to cut off views of the dancers’ feet. In St. Louis, setting up the stage at the bottom of an amphitheater-like glen avoided that problem, but squeezing it into that spot was a worrisomely close shave.

Despite the company’s desire for ABT Across America to echo the troupe’s transcontinental tours of the 1940s and ’50s, it was a much less grueling affair. During the war, in the 1943-4 season, the troupe performed in 73 cities, doing one-night stands in 48 of them. The tour 10 years later was similar: four months, 20 states in buses and trains, mostly a different city every day.

But if ABT Across America was shorter and cushier than that, it was significantly smaller and cheaper than the company’s touring model of recent years. “Even before the pandemic,” McKenzie told me, “presenters blanched at the cost of bringing 130 people and hiring an orchestra.” A new touring model similar to ABT Across America might “add another arm to our mission,” he said. “Dancers will be signing up. It would be extra work.”

Certainly, the tour opened up space for younger dancers. “It seems like in every piece, we’re pretty much featured evenly,” Carlos Gonzalez, a corps member, said. “It’s a great opportunity to dance and be seen and get experience we don’t usually get.”

And it felt good, Teuscher said, to reach audiences that Ballet Theater might not normally reach: “We are America’s company, so bringing ballet to America feels important.”



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