Alison Cook Beatty Dance Steps Up to the Plate

A New York-based modern company gathers New York spirits in Central Park.

An outstretched leg collides with home base, igniting a burst of dust. As the haze settles, the athlete stands to meet her masked fans. Gracefully tucking one ankle behind the other, she bows.

“After weeks of rehearsing in our tiny apartments, it was liberating and cathartic to be able to run and jump across the large fields,” reflects dancer Fiona Oba.

Oba is a member of Alison Cook Beatty Dance, directed by Alison Cook-Beatty, formerly of Paul Taylor’s second company, Taylor 2. When the troupe’s New York Live Arts season was canceled, Cook-Beatty stepped up to bat. The choreographer spotted the empty Hecksher ballfields in Central Park while on a socially-distanced jog in April.

“The field itself is designed for athletes to run and slide and jump,” she said. “I tried experimenting and improvising in the grass and on pavement and found that it was the safest place.”

From there, Cook-Beatty created a model of the field, marking it up into 6 foot segments. She brought in dancers one by one for rehearsals, relaying the movement to dancers who had left the city via Zoom. These safety precautions, along with the expanse and dirt of the diamond, pushed her to embrace new choreographic modalities.

“I love the different levels and shapes that partnering can bring and […] it forced me to find as many creative spatial designs as I could without the element of partnering involved,” she said. “It was kind of like sand art.”

“Without marley floors and mirrors, insecurities surrounding traditional ideas of technical perfection seemed to dissipate and we became more daring and intuitive in our approach to the choreography,” Oba recalled. “The open air widened our perspective.”

Around the field, however, a different experiment had begun to take place. At first, passersby would stop to observe, clapping after each run. Then, they came back — and this time, they brought lawn chairs.

“We had dogs running through the dance and little kids who we were sharing the space with,” Cook-Beatty said. “To see these dancers flying through the space when everyone has been feeling so cooped up […], especially here in the city, I think it touched a lot of people’s hearts.”

One such returning pedestrian was local fashion designer Ali Taghavi. After several conversations, Beatty asked him to create costumes.

“One day he must have come back for the fourth time,” she recalled. “I just kind of threw it out there with a smile, but he was dead serious.”

Taghavi’s costumes, baseball-inspired separates with coordinating masks, give the dancers the freedom of movement to perform traveling, athletic choreography. Shot by Ellen Maynard, the dance film, “Central Park Field #4,” premieres October 3rd during the company’s virtual gala. The season, funded largely by an emergency grant from Dance/NYC, also includes a site-specific study in the Central Park woods and an ode to Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

“As the USNS Comfort sailed into New York harbor, we pushed onward,” Cook-Beatty said. “This dance has that spirit.”