Penn’s Annenberg Center found a way to be a live venue in a virtual world

When members of the Paul Taylor Dance Company take the stage of the Zellerbach Theatre on Thursday for what will be the troupe’s 13th appearance at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, some things will be missing. Half the 16-member company. Intermissions. An audience the dancers can see and hear.

Instead, there’ll be masks. Cameras. A program that includes two dances and one short film and takes up an hour, not an evening, for an audience watching online (and maybe emoji-applauding), from just about anywhere but the theater.

But with the exception of the 5½-minute film of Taylor’s Cloven Kingdom that was made last fall (and that will serve as a break for the dancers to change costumes between pieces) it will all be live, and the dancers will have traveled from New York to Philadelphia to be there.

Having performers live and onstage matters very much to Christopher Gruits, executive and artistic director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Center.

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“We have a total commitment to live performance. That’s what we do. We’re not a film company. ... We produce and present live performance,” he said. Beyond that, “we really wanted to maintain work for artists as much as possible, as well as our staff. So in the limited fashion that we can, and I think it’s fairly robust, given the circumstances, we wanted to make sure that we were able to hire artists, to pay them a fee, at a time when they really didn’t have a lot of options.”

And so, since last fall, the center has been hosting live performances by groups small enough to satisfy safety concerns — its own, the university’s, the acts’, the crews’, and the city’s — and streaming them online for an audience that has access to both a live chat with one another and a post-performance Q&A with performers that’s moderated by Gruits. Besides the center’s longtime subscribers, the shows have attracted virtual audience members from 39 U.S. states and six foreign countries.

“The digital medium really presents a unique opportunity to try to innovate and adapt to a totally different channel,” Gruits said. Though the Annenberg’s model includes things in-person audiences wouldn’t have — an online chat feature that can continue during performances and close-ups on the performers — it tries to preserve as much as possible the nature of live performance. “These are really ephemeral live events that we’re trying to support financially. So you have to buy a ticket to watch, it’s available for a couple days to watch, and then it goes away.”

The Annenberg’s spring digital season kicked off Feb. 4 with a jazz duo, singer Samara Joy and guitarist Pasquale Grasso. The next scheduled event after Thursday’s is on Feb. 25, when Gwyn Roberts and Richard Stone, founding artistic codirectors of Tempesta di Mare, will perform on the recorder, flute, and theorbo, focusing on pieces by baroque composers who, instead of traveling to study and perform, remained close to home. A full schedule of the Annenberg’s season may be found at annenbergcenter.org.

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Thursday’s performance will the first time that the New York-based Paul Taylor company, led by the late Taylor’s chosen successor, artistic director Michael Novak, has toured since the pandemic shutdown last March. And though eight is half the number of dancers who would normally have traveled here, it will be the most the Annenberg has hosted at one time since the shutdown.

For Novak, who attended University of the Arts in the early 2000s and was an apprentice at the Pennsylvania Academy of Ballet, traveling to Philadelphia is about more than just returning to a city where the company has been performing since 1967, when it appeared at the University of Pennsylvania’s Irvine Auditorium.

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“I deeply believe that the arts and artists have a social responsibility to be there for culture and to reflect back on it, to inspire it, to provide escapism, to confront things. And I think what this pandemic has made many of us realize is how much we miss those human moments of connection,” Novak said. “I think it’s important to remind people that we will get through this, and art will be on the other side.”

I think it’s important to remind people that we will get through this, and art will be on the other side.”

First, though, art has to jump through a few hoops, including COVID-19 testing. “The show must go on” having been set aside for the pandemic, a Nov. 19 performance by the Philadelphia-based Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers had to be moved to April 22 after what was described in an email from the troupe as a “potential COVID-19 exposure.”

Gruits estimated that 60-70% of the performers for the center’s livestreamed events are coming from out of town, even if some aren’t coming from as far as they might have in a normal season, when the center attracts international tours. “I think we’re really taking advantage of our location between New York and D.C.,” he said.

“It’s what we call a run-out,” Novak said of the company’s visit to Philadelphia this week. “We leave from our home, we go to the ... venue, we tech [do a technical rehearsal], we perform, and then we get back in our vehicle and head back home.”

Before the pandemic, “we almost always engaged in a multiday performance engagement with the Annenberg that allowed the company to not only perform over multiple evenings (sometimes with multiple programs of dances), but also enjoy the City of Brotherly Love,” he said in a later email.

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Beyond that, what’s most different from the company’s January 2020 visit, Novak said, is everything from the smaller ensemble to the masks the company’s wardrobe department is making “so that they’re part of the overall esthetic of each work.”

The Paul Taylor program, like the Annenberg’s other digital offerings, has been streamlined.

“We’ve really tried to prioritize a digital-first approach,” said the Annenberg’s Gruits. “We’ve looked at small-format shows that can be really tight programs at about an hour, including Q&A with the artist, because we know that people online just don’t consume performing arts for as long as they would in person. So this isn’t like you sit down and you watch a 2 ½-hour program.”

For the first dance on Thursday, Novak said, the company is using a version of Arden Court that Taylor had choreographed for nine dancers in 1981. In 1994 he had rechoreographed it for six so that the smaller second company, known as Taylor 2, could perform it. In all, he did that for two dozen of his 147 works.

“It has been a real asset for us,” Novak said.

Between Arden Court and A Field of Grass, which Taylor choreographed in 1993, the dancers will do their change as Cloven Kingdom is shown.

“So we’re trying to go into Philadelphia and in one hour, give audiences as much of a breadth of the spectrum of Paul Taylor’s work in a very reduced amount of time,” Novak said.

He’s also seeking to make sure cameras enhance rather than detract from the experience of live performance.

“Shooting dance at different angles can help amplify choreography, and also distract you from seeing choreography,” Novak said. “There’s another level of artistic choice that needs to be made to preserve the intention and the artistic integrity of the work, while having an awareness that you’re also controlling the viewer’s experience.”

For instance, “you don’t want to get so dynamic that you’re not seeing the full body.”

The Annenberg’s crew, not Novak’s, will control the cameras, but “we’re working on basically an Excel sheet of that breakdown so we can be sure to get the best shot at every angle for every section of the work throughout the evening,” he said.

In an interview last year with The Inquirer, Novak, who retired from dancing in late 2019, talked about liking to sit in the front of the house and sensing “the vibe in the room.”

How much has he missed that this past year?

“I miss it tremendously. There’s nothing like live theater. And I think one of the one of the lessons that’s been talked about a lot, both in our company and in our industry, is how energetic performance really is.”

Beyond being an artistic exchange, “there’s actually an energetic exchange that happens” between performers and the audience, he said.

“It means a lot to be given a stage right now,” Novak said. “That the Annenberg is working to host artists, it’s an incredible challenge. And it’s very much appreciated.”

Paul Taylor Dance Company, program debuts virtually 7 p.m. Thursday. All tickets must be purchased by 7:30 p.m. Thursday for viewing through Saturday. Tickets for non-subscribers: $25. Information: annenbergcenter.org.