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