- Lucy Ash
- BBC reporter from New York
Image source,Robbie Fairchild
With the advent of the new crown pandemic and the closure of New York theaters, thousands of performers lost their jobs. Some people cannot even pay for their health insurance. A top dancer quickly established a company inspired by a fan gift to provide people with a way to express their feelings during the lockdown.
In the basement of a Manhattan apartment, Robbie Fairchild (Robbie Fairchild) is surrounded by buckets of scarlet peonies. “These flowers tell stories,” he told me, peeling some leaves from the stem. “I like the way they get together at the beginning, you don’t know what they will become. It’s like a live show, each flower is so different. It’s incredible.”
Robbie missed the live performance very much. Before last spring, live performances had always been a part of his life. He is the son of a wildlife scientist in Salt Lake City. He has been passionate about nature since he was a child, but he also dreamed of following in the footsteps of actor Gene Kelly. At the age of 15, he went to ballet school and served as the lead actor of the New York City Ballet for more than a decade, and then starred on stage and screen in “An American in Paris” (An American in Paris) and “Cats” and other music drama.
On March 12, 2020, Robbie got the tickets for the premiere of “Six Queens” (Six). This is a popular musical about Henry VIII’s six wives. The performance team has just arrived in New York from London. But a few hours before the curtain opened, the performance was cancelled. As the number of confirmed new crowns and deaths soared, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the closure of Broadway, the first time since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
“At first I thought, okay, just two weeks,” Robbie said, “Then my performance in August, and the performance in September began to be cancelled. I thought,’Oh, God! It will be tough. ‘”
At the beginning of the blockade, Robbie danced on the roof of the apartment building to keep his figure and to make the neighbors happy. Sometimes he dances by himself; sometimes he choreographs a brisk dance with his roommate, who is a dancer who often appears in music videos.
“It feels really good, because I think when the whole city is full of refrigerated trucks for transporting corpses, the public is hungry for happy dances.” He was referring to refrigerated trucks parked on the streets of New York and outside hospitals. The morgue, which contains the bodies of hundreds of deceased new crowns.
He added: āWhen the authorities become scary, as an artist, you must find some way to escape reality for the public.ā
The routine dance on the roof became a hot topic on Instagram, but it did not help Robbie pay the rent. He was also told that he did not have enough working weeks this year to qualify for health insurance, so he had to start paying the insurance company a monthly premium of $900. He said: “As a performer with 15 years of performance experience, it is inhumane to be suddenly given up by an insurance company like this.”
According to data from the Broadway Alliance (the trade association of national theaters in the United States), nearly 97,000 people rely on performing shows in Midtown Manhattan for their livelihoods.
Many of them: performers, producers, technicians, stage managers and others suddenly found themselves unemployed.
Robbie realized that he had to find another way to earn a living.
When a fan in the Netherlands sent him a large batch of roses and peonies, he arranged them as bouquets and took them to Mount Sinai West Hospital at 7pm in New York City when the whole city applauded and cheered for the frontline workers. .
“Seeing flowers can brighten people’s day, and it reminds me of the feeling of standing in front of the audience,” he said. “As a performer, whether you are on stage or in the process of sending flowers, you are eager for this. Kind of communication.”
This experience inspired Robbie to set up a floral company called Boo.Kay, selling floral works called “Showstopper” (Showstopper), “the Grand Dame” and “Broadway Veteran” (Broadway Veteran) .
Image source,Getty Images
Robbie Fairchild and Liane Cope in the musical “An American in Paris.”
He first learned about floral art when he performed “An American in Paris” in the West End of London. His apartment was just around the corner from the Covent Garden Flower Academy. Out of curiosity, he signed up for a course on a rare day off. He said: “I found this to be a good treatment.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, he turned his bedroom into a studio to make hand-tied bouquets to relieve boredom and stress. And it quickly proved its profit, with the bouquet selling for $150 or more. Robbie believes that the public cannot see friends and relatives, nor can they hug them, so they send lavish flowers instead.
“It’s kind of weird,” he said: “We are very busy during the COVID-19 pandemic.” Soon, Boo.Kay needed more storage space, and Robbie moved to a ground floor apartment with a basement to accommodate a 10-foot. Wide fresh flower refrigerator.
At the beginning of his new life, Robbie had to hop on his bike at 6 in the morning to get the best deal at the flower wholesale market. He still remembered how strange it was to ride to Broadway at dawn when the lockdown was the worst.
“It was still dark outside, no one and no car,” he said. “I looked up at the theater where I used to perform. It was creepy and quiet, but all the lights were on. I thought to myself,’Oh my God, no one is here! Let’s save electricity and turn them off. Drop it! I mean, what about climate change and global warming? But I think people need lights on, it represents hope.”
At first Robbie’s flower room was alone. He walked or sometimes took his sister’s car to deliver goods around Manhattan. As the business developed, he began to hire other unemployed Broadway actors who were equally passionate about flowers. Adam Perry is a dancer who became seriously ill for five months after contracting the new crown virus last year. He said that making bouquets helped him “recover his life.”
On a sunny Friday night, Robbie was selling his wares outside a store in West Village, New York. People gathered around him, drank sparkling rose wine, and listened to some of his friends singing Broadway songs.
Image source,Guglielmo Mattioli
The weekly event is called “Friday Flowers” and is the creative idea of āāJennifer Shanker. She usually sells jewelry through department stores, but when these stores are closed, she opens a temporary store “Muse” “. Someone asked her to contact Robbie, and she started selling hand-made glass vases to match his flower arrangement.
“I became a retailer by accident. I admire Robbie’s hustle and bustle during the COVID-19 pandemic,” she said with a smile. “The neighborhood feels very depressed. His flowers add a touch of much-needed color to us.”
Robbie is now back on stage across the United States and is preparing to give a special performance for the 80th birthday of the famous American contemporary choreographer Twyla Tharp.
But Boo.Kay is still in business and currently has only six part-time employees. The constantly increasing list of customers each week helps the company maintain its balance of payments. Robbie asked if his previous ballet company could provide them with flowers and suggested matching the color of his bouquet with the color of the tutu and tunic of the upcoming ballet. A Broadway star often orders flowers for her dressing room; he hopes that when more theaters reopen in early fall, others will follow suit.
Robbie said: “It feels like our industry is so dispensable, but we contribute so much money to the economy of this city,” (someone estimates that this number may be $14.8 billion per year).
“Dance and performance always rank after sports events, but when people think of New York, they think of Broadway. For the past year and a half, flowers are my life, because of flowers I created my own company,” he Say, “I don’t have a stage, so I carefully designed a new performance space. I am extremely proud of it.”