Unlocked - a dance show created over Zoom during the pandemic is coming to Gosport

The members of ​Nova Grace Productions would regularly get together on Zoom, and through working with choreographer Karen Hill, chronicled the period.

The company is now bringing the completed 90 minute show, Unlocked, out of their homes and on the road for a short tour, which starts in Gosport next week.

Company co-founder and dancer Rosy Nevard says: ‘We started doing ballet classes together over Zoom as a way of keeping fit and keeping in touch with each other and to feel less lonely and have a chance to do what we normally do.

‘Then we very quickly realised we had all this time and no financial restrictions because you didn't have to pay for a studio or to travel. Karen started developing these creative tasks just to get us to move as much as we could within the room, making the most of the space in our bedrooms or kitchens, or wherever we were.

‘She came up with tasks like: what shapes can you make inside the doorframe? Or how can you use the wall to counterbalance yourself? Or what can you do on a chair? We started developing these short sections of choreography and by the end of first lockdown we had our first 15 minute completed section.

‘Then with each lockdown we added another 15 minutes.’

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While there were obvious space restrictions on the dancers’ homes and the need to stay in front of the camera, this wasn’t their only problem.

‘It was also the timing and the music,’ says Karen. ‘With Zoom, if I heard it at one time, everyone was hearing it start at slightly different times in their rooms. So when we were doing performances I can remember them saying, “We've never counted so much!” When you're dancing with a company, with other people, you dance together and you keep in time with each other as well as with the music. It's unspoken. But here there was no one to take any cues from, so you had to learn everything.

‘I tried to do some partner work where they're leaning up against walls – we tried to edit it so it looked like they're leaning against each other, but then you get different perspectives, some people were closer to the cameras than others, so one would be tiny and one huge,’ she laughs.

‘It was quite fun though, and it made you think, it made you work things out rather than instantly being able to do it in the dance studio.’

From the dancers’ point of view Rosy says the timing was the biggest challenge: ‘It was a brand new challenge that we'd never come across before and it wasn't always easy. It was difficult to be patient enough to wait to catch up. Where you would normally be able to demonstrate eight counts (in the studio) and be able to pick it up instantly, we might spend 15 minutes on trying to learn one eight count: “Was that one?” “Are you using your left hand? But it looks like your right hand...” Things like that. It was difficult but we got used to it.

‘It was exhausting in a different way to how dancing in a studio is. When you're in a small space the dancing is going to be less aerobic because you can't jump and leap and run, but it was definitely more mentally tiring to work in Zoom than physically tiring.’

As a vulnerable person, Karen also had to shield, so credits the dance session as being ‘quite a release.’

‘To do this was great, I could focus on something, and that was so powerful. All dancing has a lot of energy, and it could give you that focus rather than literally climbing up the walls.

‘Then where you were allowed out and then you weren't and we captured all of that by accident, we didn't plan it, it just happened. But by the end of it we had a diary, basically, of what happened, without any pre-thought about doing that.’

The live show features four dancers, but as Rosy explains: ’There are various dancers who've been involved over the time that it was being made. Depending on who was free and whatever commitments they had. At one point we had dancers in Uganda who were taking part in the classes. Because we weren't in one place in one studio, anybody anywhere in the world was able to join in virtually if they had an internet connection.’

Now they’re working in person again, they’ve been enjoying adapting the pieces created in their bedrooms onto stages.

‘When you're on a stage, you always want to use the whole space,’ says Karen, ‘you're encouraged to do that. Having the doorframes that we had made gave that space again – it's their space.

And Rosy adds: ‘Working on it and rehearsing it again, there's been a funny feeling in my stomach, it brings back those feelings and memories of lockdown. I think we'll see this as the completion of the project and then Karen's got lots of ideas for what comes next...’

The show is at Quay West Studios, Gosport on Friday, May 5 from 6.30pm. For tickets click here.