The Australian Ballet

Art During Lockdown

AHWS 2500x1780

How the pandemic changed art and inspired William Forsythe’s The Barre Project

Many of us can remember viewing the viral National Opera Paris video showing dancers rehearsing at home during the global lockdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. There was a reassuring thrill in seeing dancers rehearse in a stripped-down manner, where the barre transformed from studio equipment into a familiar object in our homes – a chair, a bed, a kitchen counter, a table. It was a beautiful peek behind the scenes, affording us a shared intimacy in watching the human body move with profound grace in familiar mundane settings.
 
The allure of being invited behind the curtain and into the inner sanctum of the rehearsal room was the premise of The Barre Project. Created and rehearsed on Zoom during the pandemic, The Barre Project was the product of a specific cultural moment, and yet, remains just as relevant in 2025. 

Under ‘stay at home’ directives across the globe, this project moved away from the rehearsal studios and performing stages and instead focused on the key ‘object’ of the dancer’s rehearsal space, the barre, as the main theme of the five episodes that feature within it. 

3307456 Forsythe Productions Blake Works VI The Barre Project Forsythe Credit Geovanny Santillan 2

Brooklyn Mack and Tiler Peck, The Barre Project (Blake Works II) (Forsythe) 2021
Photo Geovanny Santillan

There is a psychology behind why such a glimpse into the intimate rehearsal process is alluring. One way to think about it is that of sensory empathy or phenomenology, which is a model of philosophy that highlights the importance of the lived body’s experiences. Phenomenology compels us to consider what our senses experience through embodiment and to link that with our inner mind. Put simply, we ‘rehearse’ and learn who we are by experiencing our bodies and watching others. 

Around the same time as The Barre Project was first created, Céline Sciamma’s film, Petite Maman (2021), written and produced during lockdown, presents us with an eight-year-old protagonist who learns who her mother is and, in turn, who she is, by time travelling to experience her mother’s childhood. That is, by eating, touching, and hearing what her mother did in the intimate rehearsal space of her childhood home.

200 Press Part 2 Shoot Day 46 1

Roman Mejia, The Barre Project (Blake Works II) (Forsythe) 2021
Photo Geovanny Santillan

The Barre Project extends this sensory logic through dance by way of its own intimate spaces. There are not many props besides the barre itself, and the dancers are in minimalistic costumes of simple leotards. The focus then narrows to their bodies and our keen sensory perceptions of what those bodies can do without the distraction of grand set design or more extravagant costuming. Our own sensing bodies therefore shift to experience the pure joy of movement and energy communicated through the choreography and the dancers’ bodies – what they can do, what they can communicate, what they can feel and see, despite the outside world shrinking or changing.

This type of art is a love letter to our fascination with the blood, sweat, tears and joy that go into being human, as well as the pure ability of the body to create within any circumstances and any setting. The Barre Project’s opening dedication is, ‘for all those who have sustained themselves with a barre in any form’. In a post-pandemic world, it continues to offer us the human body as a resilient, empathetic, and joyful sensory experience in which we are constantly ‘rehearsing’.

Blake Works V (The Barre Project) as part of the triple bill Prism opens in Melbourne on September 25

Prism