COVID-19 DANCE SCORE
Six feet. Two metres. See the folks around you. See how they are moving. See where they are going. See them seeing you. Feel the space between you. See the space around you. Move only as fast as the slowest amongst us can. Be vigilant. Identify the folks that don’t feel and see the people around them. Give them extra room. Be patient. Be kind. Be clear. Be safe.
James Gnam / Over the past six months, I have been watching with fascination as this public dance has evolved out of necessity. All of us learning (and some of us with a great deal of anxiety) about how we can share space together.
After four months of isolation, and the arts sector shifting almost constantly, we felt that it was essential to gather a group of artists that were interested in taking the COVID-19 Dance Score (above) and finding ways to fold desire, spontaneity and agency into it, to respond to pressures that we’ve felt to be creatively productive, by investing and working on something that could not be reproduced, sold or commodified. We wanted to build dances that could only live then, dances that were the sum of the people, places and publics they encountered.
For four weeks this summer, Ileanna Cheladyn, Shion Skye Carter, Bevin Poole Leinweber, Vanessa Goodman, Sarah Wong, Lorenz Santos, Hana Rutka, Adrian Deleeuw and Heather Barr joined Natalie and I three times a week to check in, dance and check out. We met at the Quilchena, Pacific Spirit and Jericho Beach parks. It was beautiful and essential and hard and we learned a lot about clear communication and protocol for safety and agency within the context of a global pandemic. We found new dances with new people. We were surrounded by people trained to see and feel the spaces between us.
We learnt to play with these spaces.
We learnt to fold other peoples’ desires and impulses into our own experience and made space for the potential of that to manifest.
In a time when we need to recalibrate capitalism’s relationship to creative productivity, it felt important to invest in artists and process without an overarching goal of making a thing to sell.
