Live from New York: Caleb Teicher

Last March, as New York's vaccination campaign slowly picked up speed, Caleb Teicher & Company presented one of the city's first officially sanctioned indoor performances in over a year in the Guggenheim Museum's soaring rotunda. To piano accompaniment by Conrad Tao, Teicher and their company of dancers marked the historic moment with a program that drew from the traditions of swing dance with moving optimism. "It was very limited capacity, it was fifty people, but by late March that's what we could do," they recall.

In October, Teicher directed and performed in Sw!ng Out at Chelsea's Joyce Theater, a celebration of the contemporary swing movement that helped re-envision a genre nearly a century old for a new era. For Teicher, the show, which will have a national tour this spring, is the culmination of their work over the past few years as they have evolved from a teenage tap-dancing prodigy to an essential voice in the dance world. "I do feel like a lot of the things I've cultivated within myself and within my crew of collaborators are distilled in that show," they say. "We've been working on what to say for so long and we just want people to see it now. We just want it to exist."

After years of development, Sw!ng Out was already fully realized by the summer of 2020, but Teicher stresses that the pandemic shutdown, which they call the "longest break from the hustle I've ever had," has served to reframe their perspective on the future in meaningful ways. "I've done a lot of things I hoped to do and I think after your first lap of certain things that were on your lists, the question is, 'So we just do it again? We just try to perpetuate that experience forever?'" they offer. "Those are big things on my mind. Just because it was something I enjoyed doing at seventeen or twenty-one or twenty-four doesn't mean it's something I enjoy doing at twenty-eight or something that I could see myself doing for the next decade or three."

As the arts world contemplates its place and purpose in society at large, Teicher says they hope that this opportunity to reimagine and reinvent, which has come at great cost to many performers and institutions alike, will not be wasted. "I just thought, 'So we just start again? We just go back into it and do the things we did before?'" they elaborate. "I'm still having those thoughts. I still have a lot of questions for myself and for everyone I work with and for the whole world about how we continue forth and what we choose to do with our life force, with the energy we have when we wake up every day. How similar does it look to what we did prior? Some of it's just about where our minds are. I feel like my mind is in a very different place than it was just a year and a half ago."

Sw!ng Out's national tour begins Saturday at the George Mason University Center for the Arts, Fairfax, Virginia. Read this story and many more in print by ordering our third issue here. See the full Live in New York series here.