COVID-19 has given the phrase “bedroom 

pop” a whole new meaning. High profile musi-
cians across the world have flocked to video 
conferencing and streaming platforms like 
Zoom and Instagram Live to perform and chat 
with fans more than ever before, often from 
the comfort of their bedrooms. British singer 
and experimental pop superstar Charli XCX 
took this ascending intimacy between artist 
and listener and cranked it up to the max. Her 
new record how i’m feeling now was recorded 
and produced at lightspeed — all from scratch 
over the course of a month — 
and Charli documented the 
process live all along the way. 
Fans were able to tune in as 
she wrote lyrics, filmed music 
videos and collaborated with 
pop music’s most cutting-
edge producers, providing an 
intimate look into the synthe-
sis of an electropop gem.

The project began on April 

6 when Charli announced 
it on a Zoom call. She sim-
ply said she was starting a new album from 
scratch, promised to open up the creative pro-
cess to her fans and set a release date just over 
a month away. And thus Charli and her fans 
embarked on a grand pop music experiment, 
every day between announcement and release 
being a part of the journey to how i’m feeling 
now. Charli modeled in “photoshoots” (pic-
tures her boyfriend took on his phone in their 
bedroom) that were shared with and edited by 
countless artists to make alternate covers for 
each new single, ranging from professionally 
designed album covers to humble fanart. She 
live streamed with an eclectic bunch of musi-
cians, celebrities and public figures including 
Paris Hilton and 100 gecs. And maybe most 
impressively, Charli stuck to the arbitrarily 
imminent finish line she set for herself: The 
polished, full-length LP released without delay 

on May 15.

Making how i’m feeling now was not just a 

cute idea or an experiment — it was an unbe-
lievable success. The final album is a weirdly 
21st-century product of a pandemic, an unbe-
lievably relevant concoction and nothing short 
of brilliant.

Lyrically, how i’m feeling now lives up to its 

title, reflecting the torrent of emotions Charli 
has felt over the months cooped up in her home 
in LA. The album kicks off in an aggressively 
sinister fashion with “pink diamond,” where 
Charli sings maniacally about her desire to 
go out. The hook repeats “I just wanna go 
real hard” almost like a broken robot, a party 

animal’s internal breakdown. 
She describes her attempts to 
manifest party energy while 
confined to video chats, singing 
“Watch me shine for the boys 
and the cameras / In real life, 
could the club even handle us?” 
She doubles down on this senti-
ment near the end of the album 
on “anthems,” featuring a verse 
she wrote on Instagram Live 
that actually evolved based on 
fan input. One of the most gut-

ting lines in the verse that gets to the heart of 
Charli’s primal party urges — “Wanna feel the 
heat from all the bodies” — was actually sug-
gested by a fan on the livestream.

For the most part, this is a love album. Charli 

oscillates between a sense of impending doom 
for her relationship and a romantic renaissance, 
a spectrum of emotional discord that captures 
the highs and lows of love in quarantine. 
Where the heartfelt balladry of “forever” is a 
musical sendoff for a relationship on its last leg, 
the romantic nostalgia of “7 years” acknowl-
edges a shift from distance to inseparability. At 
times these emotions are captured in musical 
delirium, with intense infatuation on “claws” 
and conflicted paranoia on “detonate.” vocals 
suiting the lovesick lunacy within the lyrics.

It’s said that every theater is inhabited by 

at least one ghost, and contrary to legends 
propagated by Halloween, these ghosts do 
not like the dark. Thus, when the curtain 
falls and a theater’s house empties, an 
employee will leave a light — a ghost light — 
to burn onstage until the performers return. 
Across the world, ghost lights have remained 
on and untouched for months. But the lives 
of performers continue offstage, each day 
adding pressure to find performance spaces 
on digital platforms. What happens when 
the ghost lights keep burning and we’re 
left with a stage wholly mediated by posts, 
shares, comments and likes? 

The New York City Ballet sent its danc-

ers home and closed its doors on March 
26, a month before the company was set to 
begin its 2020 spring season. At the time, 
NYC museums and cultural centers had 
already been shuttered and dance compa-
nies around the world were simultaneously 
lowering their curtains. Ballet schools fol-
lowed a similar pattern: Suspended classes 
became virtual or cancelled and end-of-
year recitals became objects of distant 
memory. Within a few weeks, dancers of 
all ages began the harsh transition off the 
stage and away from the studio. Dancers, 
notorious for their inability to stand still, 
stood frozen at a collective crossroads of 
where to turn next. 

Then, the side projects started: NYCB 

Principal Dancer Megan Fairchild 
launched a series of fascinating interviews 
with other industry professionals, Cloud & 
Victory dancewear owner Min Tan started 
her #GoodBalletJuju podcast and NYCB 
Principal Tiler Peck joined the list of many 
professionals who took to Instagram Live 
to teach ballet class. 

Peck’s classes quickly became arche-

types of a ballet world in quarantine: an 
elite figure spending her time democratiz-
ing ballet for her digital family. Peck is one 
of the many dancers to have increased her 
online presence in the last few months, 
and she’s arguably the most successful. 

A class with Tiler Peck would normally 

be considered an expensive anomaly, most 
likely reserved for the occasional celebrity 
workshop. Now, anyone from anywhere 
can become Peck’s student. She has taught 
a rigid six-days-a-week schedule for almost 
two months now, providing asynchronous 
feedback to dancers who tag her in their 
posts and never asking for compensation in 
exchange for such dedication. The process 
is a beautiful gift of educational generos-
ity — ballet training has never been easier 

to come by. 

The generosity doesn’t stop at just bal-

let. Most every day, Peck also invites a 
new guest from her seemingly endless list 
of artistically gifted friends to join her on 
Instagram. Broadway stars, ballet legends 
and Juilliard graduates make up a few of 
the categories featured. Each day, Peck 
and her guest offer a quick collaboration 
for one section of class. On April 2, “The 
Little Mermaid” Broadway actress Sierra 
Borgess sang “Part of Your World” while 
Peck danced an adagio combination. A 
few days later, former NYCB Principal 
Heather Watts took 10 minutes to teach 
Peck’s group the beginning of “Serenade,” 
an iconic George Balanchine composition. 
On April 21, Peck danced to the piano and 
vocals of John Batiste, the musical director 
of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” 

These appearances are more than high-

lights to an already exhilarating online 
experience — they are emblematic of a 
growing camaraderie across artistic fields. 
Ballet is an art form marinated in a history 
of haut monde audiences who kept their 
content segregated from much of the larger 
artistic world. Tradition can sometimes be 
the most beautiful part of ballet, but when 
that tradition swerves too far toward pre-
serving elitism it can also turn dangerous. 
Coronavirus may be fast-tracking ballet’s 
transition away from such danger. 

As dancers on Instagram erode layers of 

distance between audience and performer, 
Peck offers a quintessential example of 
this change: A ballet class usually occurs in 
a studio with a wooden barre and a special 
floor accompanied solely by classical piano 
music. Now, Peck and her almost 200,000 
followers take class from kitchens and 
basements, accompanied by Broadway lyr-
ics and supported by whatever floorboards 
or carpeting one’s home offers. Old bound-
aries crumble every day, offering glimpses 
into a new world of balletic accessibility. 

Last Thursday, Peck’s guest may have 

been a familiar face to Ann Arbor audi-
ences: Michelle Dorrance, the Mac Arthur 
“Genius” tap dancer who brought her com-
pany to the Power Center in late February. 
Dorrance used a nuanced control of her 
tapping feet to create rhythm for Peck’s 
ballet combination. Much like the Febru-
ary performance, Dorrance’s contribution 
was a crisp explosion of brilliant sound 
created solely by her two feet. The collabo-
ration was suggestive of ballet’s new syn-
ergetic horizons, and Dorrance and Peck’s 
enthusiasm offered new perspectives on 
what constitutes music, what constitutes 
movement and the suddenly possible new 
intersections between the two.

6

Thursday, May 21 , 2020
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
ARTS

Professional dance, 
meet Instagram Live

ZOE PHILLIPS
Daily Arts Writer

SUMMER SERIES
SUMMER SERIES

‘how i’m feeling now’ 
exceeds expectations

Read more at michigandaily.com

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

DYLAN YONO
Daily Arts Writer

how i’m feeling now

Charli XCX

Asylum Records

