Dr. Wendy Ziecheck has found a new specialty: helping dancers to work together safely. “Testing was the key to making this happen,” she says.
By Roslyn Sulcas
Bubble, part of the growing coronavirus vocabulary — the R-factor, zoonotic, sheltering in place — can be used as a noun (“My bubble with 25 other dancers”) or a verb (“Yes, 25! We were bubbling!”).
Either way, bubbling has gained traction in the dance world as companies and organizations try to find ways of bringing artists together to create work in a safe environment. That involves rules, medical protocols, tests and vigilance, and it requires a presiding authority to decide what those should be.
Enter Dr. Wendy Ziecheck, a Manhattan internist, who trained with George Balanchine’s doctor and was the medical director for the Rockettes before taking this unlikely new career path. She is currently supervising a bubble for Dance Theater of Harlem, which recently traveled together to the secluded residency center, Kaatsbaan, in Tivoli, N.Y., to work for three weeks. (While there, the dancers will chat on Zoom to patrons, and host a dance party, during the company’s virtual gala on Monday.)
She is also consulting on the coming Fall for Dance season; the Works & Process program at the Guggenheim, which has carried out six bubbles in upstate New York this year; and for the New York City Ballet-run New York Choreographic Institute, which currently has 22 dancers installed at the Martha’s Vineyard Performing Arts Center.
It was Duke Dang, the director of Works & Process, who first approached Dr. Ziecheck. In a telephone interview, Mr. Dang said he had been thinking about how the actor and film producer Tyler Perry had put his cast and crew in a bubble to keep working, as had the N.B.A., and wondered if this could be a model for Works & Process.
First, Mr. Dang consulted a bioethicist, Robert Klitzman, to make sure it was ethical “to approach artists with the opportunity at a time of such vulnerability and unknown.” The answer was yes, and a friend recommended Dr. Ziecheck to help with protocols. By early June, he was booking artists and residency centers in upstate New York that were going unused.
A bubble, though, is an expensive affair. Works & Process had some money put aside for a rainy day, Mr. Dang said, “and by anyone’s definition this is a rainy day.” Virginia Johnson, the artistic director of Dance Theater of Harlem, said it cost the company “over $100,000 to do this for three weeks.” It wasn’t an option, she said, until the Mellon and Alphadyne Foundations contributed money to make it happen.
It helps that Dr. Ziecheck was a dancer in a previous life. “I like to say I’m a much better doctor than I ever was a dancer!” she said in a Skype conversation. She studied at the Washington School of Ballet (as did Ms. Johnson, who remembered her) and danced with pickup groups around the country, including a stint with Ballet Oklahoma, then run by Edward Villella.
After a knee injury in 1983, she had three surgeries, and managed to continue dancing until 1987. Her surgeon, Dr. William Hamilton, who had worked closely with New York City Ballet since the 1970s, was an inspiration. But she said other doctors she dealt with were dismissive and uninformed. “I said to myself, ‘I can do a better job at this than they can.’”
Encouraged by a family tradition of female doctors and nurses, she headed to medical school. “I was interested to know why my body had betrayed me.”
In the Skype conversation, Dr. Ziecheck, 64 (“going on 44” she wrote in an email), talked about her long involvement with the dance world, exactly what happens in her bubbles, and the highlights of her new role. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.
How did you become involved with dancers as a doctor?
After I graduated [from medical school], I was lucky enough to become affiliated with Dr. Edith Langner, Balanchine’s doctor, which was sheer serendipity. There were a lot of dance world stars who came to her. When she retired, I took over.
You were medical director of the Rockettes from 2008 to 2019. What did your job involve?
The Rockettes have quite an elaborate wellness program that is a well-oiled machine. I had a little office in Radio City Music Hall, and would go there for a couple of hours a week to see them. They tend to have a lot of neck injuries because they have to wear these huge headpieces, like animal heads, and sometimes someone would get smacked in the face with a prop and loose a tooth. It was definitely more of a contact sport than ballet!
What did you think when you were approached by Duke Dang about putting together bubble protocol?
I immediately believed we could make it work with proper protocols and adequate testing. Unfortunately the dance world is not as well funded as the sports world. We couldn’t, for example, do the daily testing that the N.B.A. do. I doctored (sorry!) their protocol, using New York City guidelines, to incorporate frequent testing and quarantining.
I already had my own laboratory in my office, for basic medical tests, and once the rapid antigen test became available, the whole thing was feasible.
Talk us through exactly what happens.
We sequester the dancers for 14 days before they go into their residency bubble. We ask them to maintain distance from family or household members, if there are any, to stay home, wear masks and limit their exposure. On Day Five they get their first antigen test, and we ask them to really hunker down after that. On the day of departure, each one is tested at my office, and isolated for 15 minutes until the result is back. If they are cleared, they go straight to the bus, and the cohort they are with becomes their family for the next few weeks.
I do the testing, but I am always juggling with my medical practice, so I don’t go with them to the residencies. Once they are at the residency, no one is allowed in or out. If, say, a physical therapist has to come in, they are tested first. Everyone is masked and there are daily temperature and symptom tests by a Covid compliance officer, who can be someone in the company, trained by New York State. If they are there longer than 10 days, they have to do a mail-in saliva test. So far, we have had no positive results from tests.
Do you do a diagnostic of each company? Does company size matter?
Not really. It’s more about the context, and whether the protocol needs to be modified. Fall for Dance, for example, is more involved, because dancers aren’t living together, and they are coming in and out of the rehearsal studios. Everyone involved in any way has to get tested every four days in my office, which is luckily just a few blocks away. They have to be masked for everything except filming, even in rehearsals. And we have to adhere to the numbers of people per cubic foot mandated by New York State.
I always ask if a piece will have partnering in it, although to be honest it doesn’t really affect any decisions. If I harken back to the N.B.A., they are bumping into each other and spitting, and they have maintained a tremendous negativity level.
This must have been a fascinating departure for you, despite the difficult circumstances.
I am just glad that there are people who recognize how important it is to get artists working and creating again. It has been creative for me too.
It’s funny to think that I have put Q-tips up the nostrils of my greatest dance heroes. What a job! What a world!
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