Juilliard Students Go All Out for Online Performance
Like other schools, performing arts conservatory The Juilliard School is closed due to the pandemic. But constraints drive creativity, and a group of dance, drama, and music students at the school (along with some alumni like Yo-Yo Ma, Laura Linney, Patti LuPone, and Itzhak Perlman) have created this wonderful performance of Ravel’s Bolero, each performing from their own home.
This is one of the best and most creative grid music videos I’ve seen. The meeting through the glass at 3:40 was genuinely moving. You can read about how the performance came together.
Created with the support of a roster of internal producers, staff, and faculty members as well as a team of external artistic and technical personnel, Bolero Juilliard is a complex online puzzle with many components being conceived, rehearsed, and produced simultaneously. Keigwin and his co-choreographer, Nicole Wolcott, created a storyboard based on states of being and emotional concepts like “Interior Lives” or “Soothing.” Juilliard dancers learn Keigwin’s choreography in Zoom sessions, creating a simulacrum of unity and cohesion very much in spite of the reality of social isolation. Juilliard actors, singers, and alumni contribute videos of emotionally specific gestures and actions. Rather than gathering in-person as they normally would, members of the Juilliard Orchestra and Juilliard Jazz — from wherever they happen to be — video-record themselves playing individual lines, which are edited together to create a complete piece from disparate parts.
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