As the dancers of Utah’s Ballet West prepared for their first public performance during the COVID-19 pandemic, directors Diana Whitten and Tyler Measom filmed the company to document how they dealt with the difficulties and uncertainty of creating art during unprecedented times.
Measom and Whitten more or less embedded with the ballet company for a month last year. They followed the dancers, the choreographers, the crew, and the staff as they navigated colossal challenges in the lead up to opening night. All along, they wondered: Will the curtain rise? Measom and Whitten join us to talk about filming an art form as intimate as dance under the stress of a global pandemic and what they learned from these dancers in the time they spent together.
Their nine-part documentary series is called IN THE BALANCE: Ballet for a Lost Year and is available for viewing on Films.RadioWest.org and Balletwest.org.
