Earlier this week, I sat with my laptop open on the floor of my living room in the small room that had contained so much of my physical activity last year: YouTube yoga, Zoom Pilates, Instagram live dance classes. This time around, I was watching an instructional video with other people on how to dance in a much larger area – the 55,000 square foot drill hall on Park Avenue Armory.
While the live indoor performance is slowly returning to New York, the Armory is hosting “SOCIAL! the Social Distance Dance Club ”, which started a sold out run on Tuesday. The event is known as an “interactive and experience-oriented movement piece” and a “shared moment of cathartic liberation” and is basically a sophisticated means of making music with strangers in a large room.
As the last year has taught us, we should not take such an opportunity for granted. But for me “SOCIAL!” never really started, at least not in catharsis territory. Conceived by choreographer Steven Hoggett, set designer Christine Jones, and dance-obsessed musician David Byrne – a trio with many Broadway credits – the show invites 100 attendees to groove in their own two-meter-diameter spotlights from 12 to 12 15 feet apart throughout the drilling hall. (The creative team also included choreographer Yasmine Lee and DJ Natasha Diggs.)
Via an easy-to-dance playlist that jumps from Daft Punk to James Brown to Talking Heads, Byrne’s recorded voice provides a steady stream of verbal cues: Move like you would on a New York City sidewalk (“Don’t step on that pizza”) ; now like a zombie; Now slow it down, hands in the air.
When I entered the drilling hall on Tuesday, I found the first glimpse of the “dance circles” – rows on colorful rows on the huge floor – intoxicating and full of possibilities. But being confined to her for an hour of casual teaching dance was less so. Oddly enough, the experience sometimes felt no more liberating than dancing alone in my cramped, creaky living room.
Perhaps it was the tight control at every step of the event – a perhaps inevitable aspect of institutional live performance for the foreseeable future – that hampered letting go. The part in the drilling hall was only half of the logistically complicated evening that started with a temperature check and a quick coronavirus test in the backstage corridors of the armory. the issue of a numbered “passport” for each participant, which must be worn around the neck with a lanyard; and a waiting time of approximately one hour for test results in rooms near the main hall.
While we waited, a compilation of (unfortunately uncredited) popular dance videos played, apparently from YouTube, to prepare us for the move: a flash mob at a train station; a freestyling guard at Buckingham Palace; a soul line dance class. The message: Everyone can dance! Yes, you too. These alternated with the instructional video pre-sent to ticket holders, in which Byrne, an inviting imperfect dancer himself, demonstrates a series of simple movements – a random hip wobble, a gesture to stop traffic – for all of us Can dance in unison at the end of the show.
As soon as we were in the drill hall and were determined not to leave our designated circles, we orientated ourselves to the glamorous person in the center: the dancer Karine Plantadit in the role of DJ Mad Love, who presides over two laptops on a raised platform . Along with “dance ambassadors” scattered around the room – dancers who knew what they were doing and didn’t hold back – it provided a visual and energetic anchor, someone to follow when we got lost. As an introduction, the voice of performance artist Helga Davis tried to reassure us that we might feel shaky in this unfamiliar experience, but that was fine.
When Byrne’s voice took over and we started a hand sanitizing dance (rubbing palms together, snapping imaginary excess from fingers), I tried to relax and have a good time. I looked at the people around me. Some blocked; others, like the man who stood still with thumbs in his pockets for the whole show, weren’t. I ended up somewhere in between, with bursts of inspiration swallowed up by disappointment and even sadness.
Unfortunately, dancing 15 feet away from people you don’t know doesn’t fill the void of a year without dancing together. And the show’s attempts at some sort of healing – when Byrne acknowledged “we all had a loss” or declared that “we will be resurrected” – ended up being mundane and lukewarm against the emotional complexities of the past year.
It was also hard not to brave his assertion, during one of the armory’s brief opening stories, that “what was once a social club for the elites is now available to all”. In this case, after a year of heated and necessary talks about Justice in the Arts, “anyone” was someone with $ 45 (plus fees) who grabbed one of the few tickets for the privilege of safely dancing indoors.
In the end, Byrne told us we were all VIP members of the Social Distance Dance Club. Surely this was meant to be welcoming and easy. But it didn’t get me any closer to those who were there, and I just felt further removed from those who weren’t.
SOCIAL! the Social Distance Dance Club
Until April 22nd in the armory, armoryonpark.org
