Midway through 2020, Herman Cornejo, one of the best male dancers of his generation, comes to a standstill. The company he dances for, American Ballet Theater, had to close its studios because of the pandemic. Tired of training at home, by himself, on a 5-by-7-foot square of vinyl flooring provided by Ballet Theater. “If I do a single grand jeté” — one of the powerful, spacious jumps he is known for — “I end up next to the wall,” he said at the time.

It was then that he realized what he needed was to create something of his own.

In-person performances were not an option. The dance films he had seen didn’t satisfy — too flat, too impersonal. Instead, he was determined to come up with something that “brings people closer to dancers,” he said, that “puts you in the same room with them, and allows you to move around them in space.” The Technology offered a possible solution.

With this in mind, he approached the photographer, filmmaker, and self-proclaimed “photo-scientist” Steven Sebring, who had produced a short dance film for Cornejo’s 20th anniversary at Ballet Theater.

Skylar Brandt, Cornejo’s dance partner in “New York Alive,” the Beamish piece, described the feeling of dancing inside the cylinder with Cornejo. “We would go in, just the two of us, and perform for hours to the white walls,” she said in a phone interview. “It was a little bit like dancing in outer space.”

But the longer they danced inside the circular space, Cornejo said, the more they found their bearings. “I could hear the cameras firing all around me,” he said, “and they became like the audience looking in.”