Leverage is the proud recipient of a 2021 Regional EmmyⓇ for Quarantined

 Leverage Dance Theater in collaboration with Aligned Media, & Sky Pie Studio were awarded a Mid-America Emmy Award on October 23, 2021. Adding a second award to the Best in Show, St. Louis Advertising Award won by Aligned Media for Quarantined in April 2021. 

We made Quarantined with the intention of sending it into people’s homes, knowing that as the stress of Covid-19 dragged on, bringing some fun, joy, light, perspective, and beauty into people’s homes would help. And it was something WE, as artists, could do.

We could feel the oppressiveness of the situation building, but we knew from experience that the power of relationship and creativity were ours to control, so we went back to work, from home.  Dancers began meeting once or twice weekly, online, for technique classes, and creative work sessions.

In our support of each other, we found an exceptional variety of canvases for storytelling right in each others’ living rooms, kitchens and hallways. It was not really surprising. It’s what Leverage’s  site-specific work had been doing for years, just with the twist of working isolated, through a camera lens.

Produced as the Covid-19 stay at home orders were coming to an end, Quarantined explores the perspective that even within tremendous restriction there exists extraordinary potential. It tells the story of opportunity birthed from constraint.

lockdown as part of  Leverage’s “Works From Home” series.  Using a cell phone attached to a ceiling fan, married dancers Mitchell and Claire Hilleren shared videos with Leverage artists - who offered feedback and encouragement that helped guide the work's development.

Though she knew its potential, Leverage Artistic Director Diana Barrios never imagined having the resources to realize this work beyond what a small non-profit budget could produce. What would follow was a dream many, many, many long years in the making, 

When she  began to see something truly extraordinary emerging from this work, Barrios reached out to her cousin Daniel Castro, Director of Brooklyn-based Sky Pie Studio. Castro was in town, having opted to wait out the pandemic at his mom’s St. Louis home.  

It was the first time in 28 years the cousins,  who had grown up more like siblings, living in the same apartment building, had spent more than a few days at a time together.  When Barrios wanted some advice on how to light Quarantined, she reached out to Castro.

“When I saw the work for the first time, my reaction was visceral. It felt like the situation we all found ourselves dealing with: what is life like confined to four walls?” It captured being stuck in a tiny existence, the days blurring into each other, and yet life was ongoing. Castro didn’t think better lighting would do the work justice. 

He suggested we find some partners to produce the dance for film, and QUICKLY. The stay at home orders were coming to an end, he anticipated work would be restarting and he would be returning to New York. Plus, by now Claire was 5 months pregnant, so it was now or never. We anticipated we had one week to finish the choreography, find collaborators and complete the shoot.

“For me, just deciding to venture into the world during Covid, was a daunting proposition, but figuring out how to get this extraordinary dance piece onto video was definitely going to be worth the risk and effort,” said Director of Photography, Scott Smith. “Within just a few days, we had rearranged Jeff and Claire's living room and dining room, secured furniture to the floor, placed props and rigged a controllable rotating camera to the ceiling -  continually checking ourselves for how many people were in a room at once, always masked, steady flow of sanitizer and standing as far apart as possible.  All the while, Jeff, Claire and Diana were rehearsing, rehearsing, rehearsing. Synchronizing the camera movements to the dance became part of the dance, with a dancer operating the camera herself!”

 The original concept for the production involved making the film exclusively with cell phone cameras. This had been an extension of Leverage’s original plan. The production team spent several days arranging to shoot with the new iphone 11. But, we had to confirm this idea would give us the effect we were looking for.

So, Daniel taped his iphone to a Swiffer to capture some test footage, in motion. Though entertaining, this low-tech solution told us that despite its touted capacities, the iPhone 11 could not perform in a tiny, living room, spinning in circles at the quality we needed. Who’d have figured.

 We had now lost three days of our weeklong production schedule working on the rigging for phones cameras.

Back to the drawing board the team went. Lucky for us, Scott had recruited the extraordinary Ian “McGyver” Wasserman to work as the production’s rigger.  Leverage can not begin to explain all that Ian did to make this film possible.  What we can tell you is that at some point he attached chopsticks to the camera rigging to transform a perfectly calibrated piece of equipment into something that could mimic the irregular motion of a cell phone hanging from a rickety, old ceiling fan.

And then there was the challenge of getting the fan to change directions, on cue. The fan had done this on its own during the piece’s early development, because it had been set in motion, manually, with a SWIFFER. (We knew you wondered about that).

Several technical solutions discarded, Barrios suggested that our PA, Leverage dancer Morgan Van Nest could manually operate the camera.

Smith said it was too complicated. Even he, with 30 plus years of experience, didn’t think he could do it consistently.

But Barrios had operated lights and sound on countless productions and knew what happened when you put a dancer behind those controls.  So Wasserman rigged a Nintendo controller to operate the very expensive piece of equipment suspended from the ceiling.

And it worked! It took a fair amount of rehearsal, but for a dancer, partnering with a controller, is just dancing with a prop.

For the five-months-pregnant Hilleren, it was a much harder experience than she was used to.

“What a roller coaster of emotions that week was for me. I was really excited about the opportunity and proud of Jeff for coming up with the concept, but I was nervous about letting more people into my house and just an emotional pregnant person. Once people began coming in and I saw how meticulous they were about cleaning things, I let that fear go.

It was a much harder experience movement-wise and rehearsal-wise than I was used to. My body wouldn't do things that in the past I had been able to tell it to do with no problems. I was also definitely dealing with some pregnancy brain and I couldn't hold onto material as well as I was used to. 

 By the last day of shooting I was very tired and getting emotional over the smallest things. I remember going to my room at one point just to cry. However, when the shooting was done it felt so good and I really believed we had made something unique and meaningful this time. You don't always get this feeling with dance pieces but when you do it is an incredibly rewarding experience. For a dancer, the cathartic nature of the dance, music, and performance all combining together perfectly is pure magic. ”

 
Aligned Studios won additional Emmys for their work on Quarantined: Scott Smith for Photography and Chris Myers for Editing.