On the Road With Ballet Theater. Who Needs Red Velvet Seats.

The company’s response to pandemic cancellations? An eight-city tour with sleeper buses and a foldout stage to perform outdoors.

ST. LOUIS — On an afternoon in mid-July, the heat index in Forest Park here was hovering in the upper 90s. Members of American Ballet Theater, in town on tour, had just sweated through a company class that the dancer Tyler Maloney likened to “Bikram ballet.” He and his colleagues were on an outdoor stage, and its floor was warming like a griddle. How to cool the stage before the matinee? How about scattering ice cubes across the surface? Welcome to ABT Across America, a ballet tour not quite like any before it. The company wasn’t just performing outdoors. It was performing outdoors on a stage it had brought along, a stage on wheels that hydraulically unfolds from the form of a truck. And in between putting on shows for grateful, enthusiastic crowds, the dancers were traveling from city to city like a rock band, in sleeper buses emblazoned with tour dates on the side.