Joffrey Ballet’s ‘Under the Trees’ Voices’ a Masterwork of the Pandemic Era

When dance historians and critics are finally able to look back on the work created by both dancers and choreographers between March 2020 and whenever the COVID-19 craziness fully abates — and when live performances attended by live audiences can return to full pre-pandemic “normalcy” — they will immediately be able to identify the dramatic shift in both style and substance of the current era. Whether the defining elements of “pandemic-era dance” will exert an enduring influence is open for question. Hopefully masks will disappear, intimate partnering will require less worry, and the sound of live music and applause will once again make a joyful noise. Dancers, whose art is all about physical contact and breath, have been exceptionally hard-hit during the past year and more. Yet there has been quite an evolution as these indomitable and mostly suffocatingly masked artists have moved from solo barre exercises done at a kitchen counter and captured on home video; to solo dance sequences patched together for increasingly elaborate streamed works via Zoom; to meticulously distanced pieces that have unfolded in backyards, on rooftops, in parks, and on bare city streets; to (more recently), full-scale works filmed in artfully lit studios where masks and other strict safety protocols have been meticulously observed even as a certain degree of freedom has begun to return.

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