amas Detrich, director of Germany’s Stuttgart Ballet, had been planning two big programmes of modern ballet for the summer season when the coronavirus crisis hit. “We were on tour, and had to return to Stuttgart,” he remembers. “Then one of our company tested positive. We shut down the whole ballet and went into quarantine. During those first two weeks, we still had around 10 known cases of coronavirus.” The experience clearly still haunts him, and it’s a scenario that he never wants to return to. His steps back towards live performance have been cautious. While dance in the UK remains in effective lockdown, productions in Germany and other European countries are tentatively resuming. Detrich’s dancers continued training as much as possible from their homes. In April, he got permission to consider the dancers as equivalent to professional athletes, who were permitted to train in small groups. Classes returned to the studio, but regulations stipulated nine metres’ physical distancing. A full class might be three people in a studio. Restrictions eased further, and groups were allowed to work closer, still without contact. “I began to put a programme together” – Detrich snaps his fingers – “like that”. The Response 1 programme, opening on 25 July, will be their first stage performance since March, and is designed to comply with regulations on stage, backstage and in all public areas. Determined not to overstuff the programme with solos, Detrich has included a spaced-out trio, a pas de deux (danced by a couple within the same household), and a specially adapted version of Béjart’s Bolero. Repurposing the company’s annual platform for new choreography – which had been cancelled – he also commissioned new works from eight younger company choreographers, created within and for these straitened circumstances. Three of these will be premiered at Response 1, the rest in the autumn. With just three performances and a theatre capacity reduced from 1,400 seats to 249, the programme will be hugely boosted by another repurposing manoeuvre: their free annual open-air screening, sponsored by Porsche, will shift to a newly erected drive-in movie theatre, with capacity for 1,000 cars. All this, as Detrich is the first to recognise, is underpinned by state support. The ballet is part of Staatstheater Stuttgart, which also encompasses an orchestra, an opera and a theatre company. The city of Stuttgart and the state of Baden-Württemberg jointly cover 70% of the theatre’s annual costs, and to date all 1,400 full-time employees have been paid in full through the pandemic. Very different in setup is the Parc de la Villette in Paris. A venue for local, national and international arts and culture with a strong performance strand in dance, theatre and circus, it has its own extensive grounds as well as multipurpose indoor halls designed as flexible, modular spaces with stages and seating that can be assembled and taken down – all features that make La Villette especially adaptable to evolving regulations on distancing. Even so, their entire programme – more than 30 performances – had to be either cancelled or provisionally postponed during the lockdown. Since 2 July, La Villette has now returned to life with a month-long programme called Plaine d’Artistes. Instead of presenting finished performances on stage, the entire site has been turned into a kind of open studio complex. “The principle is simple,” says artistic director Frédéric Mazelly. “We offered all our different spaces for artists to work on creation, research and rehearsal. The public can come and watch them at work for free, within timeslots and number limitations.” In total, more than 250 artists will be participating. The multidisciplinary programme includes several well-known dance names such as Angelin Preljocaj, Mourad Merzouki’s Compagnie Käfig, and Christine and the Queens’ choreographer Marion Motin. As in Stuttgart, it also gives unprecedented space to newer and emerging choreographers – 14 in total, presented through partnerships with Centre National de la Danse and Centre Pompidou. Notably, all the artists in the programme are resident in France. “Not through choice but necessity,” says Mazelly. “It was impossible to plan internationally because we couldn’t predict the regulations or travel conditions.” The programming is in any case best seen within the context of French funding. “As a public establishment supported by the ministry of culture, we have been able to pay our staff in full, and we can continue until the end of this year, at least.” Performers and stage technicians continue to be supported by the intermittence du spéctacle scheme, designed to stabilise the income of performing arts workers with irregular periods of employment. The group that has typically fallen through this net are the very people that La Villette has placed at the centre of this programme: the creators themselves. In the Czech Republic, the 32nd Tanec Praha international festival of contemporary dance has already taken place in June, though in an entirely revamped format. The festival usually encompasses a wide range of work from established companies to emerging artists, both national and international; many works are also presented in regional Czech theatres. Again, the international component was cancelled or provisionally postponed. The programme then fell to local artists, once again opening more opportunities to younger or newer choreographers. To comply with distancing restrictions, founder director Yvona Kreuzmannová shifted nearly all the work outdoors, ramping up her existing partnership with Prague’s Landscape Festival. The regional programme followed a similar line: transposing work outdoors, creating events in public spaces, and only occasionally requiring indoor spaces. “In the end,” says Kreuzmannová, “we managed 16 performances in Prague and 34 outside, accompanied by about 30 workshops and aftertalks.” “We didn’t have the big venues or big names this year,” says festival co-director Markéta Perroud, “but we reached new audiences. By adapting to public spaces, we somehow got closer to ordinary life.” Both are now eager to pursue this kind of local engagement and cultivation further. Tanec Praha has 40% of its budget covered by the state, another 30% by the city. This year, they benefited too from an emergency government package for arts and culture: over 1 billion Czech korunas (£33.6m), of which 44% went to the independent arts sector. “I was amazed,” says Kreuzmannová. “That is what the independent sector normally gets in an entire year.” Among the measures were a package that enabled ticket refunds to be postponed until October 2021, and temporary payments for freelance artists, with waivers of social and healthcare fees. Kreuzmannová points to a shift in thinking behind these facts. “The state and city have noticed the gap in support between repertory theatres and the independent arts scene. The ministry of culture has started to discuss cultural policy with us, and to start creating a new legal status for independent and freelance artists.” Much heartened, she is worldly enough to recognise this outcome as a consequence of dire straits and good luck. “There have been 20 ministers of culture since I’ve been running Tanec Praha, and almost none has listened as well as this new one [Lubomír Zaorálek, in post since August 2019]. When we met at the start of this crisis he said: tell us what you need, we will help you. That was incredible. It gave us the confidence that we could develop our dance programme rather than cancel it.”