Sometime in the middle of April I took up space in the world again, the bigger one outside of my apartment, outside of my neighborhood. Taking a seat is a bizarre feeling after a year inside. It’s sometimes exciting, sometimes terrifying. It’s always strange.
As we get out of the pandemic, not only do we walk around without masks, we learn how to re-enter our bodies. It’s wild out there – which means the happy, nerve-wracking combination of New York City and lifted restrictions – but it’s still time to hold on to whatever is slow.
The pandemic, devastating in many ways, was also an opportunity to explore the value of the body and the everyday, to refocus the eyes and to see, as dance critic Edwin Denby wrote, “Daily life is wonderfully full” of seeing things . Not only the movements of people, but also the objects around them, the shape of the rooms in which they live, the ornaments that architects make on windows and doors, the peculiar way how buildings end up in the air. “
In his 1954 essay “Dancing, Buildings and People in the Streets” (also the title of a later volume) Denby explores the art and the act of seeing both in performance and in the daily dance of life. During the pandemic, I put a lot of thought into Denby’s essay, a reminder not to stop looking at the details of everyday life. People slowed down. And you could study your body just as you could study the world.
With the increase in vaccinations, the world has changed, although it is not what it was and will not be. This spring there were again dances to be seen in person; In May, I wondered if it was time to buy an unlimited MetroCard. Some of it was great – like when members of the club world performed at the Guggenheim on Ephrat Asherie’s UnderScored, part of the Works & Process franchise. Some things were forgotten. But a lot seemed right at the moment: processions in nature, a participatory installation at MoMA, an intimate studio performance. In different ways, they all reflected the time we are in – a borderline in-between place that won’t last forever. (Hold on to it.)
Watching a performance is now not just about the dance itself, but about a glimpse into our position – maybe even a way to pause the world for a moment longer. What does it mean to watch dance like in life and to move through the room? How does your feeling affect your vision? What should be preserved from the pandemic and what could dance teach us about it?
Dance sprouts all around us; it’s purposeful, serious, healing, transgressive, inclusive and beautifully laid back. And while the theaters haven’t fully opened their doors yet, the choreography has spread to rooftops and parks, studios, cemeteries, and museums.
Processions, these performances with built-in cast, are also ubiquitous. Why now? They’re practical, of course – kept outdoors, they don’t require excessive choreographic construction. And they feel right for this time in between: They are not shows, but events that arise in the moment. And how they develop – that is, how they look and, more importantly, how they feel – depends on who shows up.
The last River to River Festival in 2021 in collaboration with Movement Research presented three processions led by Miguel Gutierrez, Okwui Okpokwasili and the Illustrious Blacks. What does it mean to inhabit our body – and the city – as individuals and as a group? “It was almost like opening doors of opportunity again as we come out of the pandemic and step into this new world,” said Lili Chopra, executive director of arts programs at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. “It is a participatory moment that you do together, but which you can take with you.”
A procession led by Gutierrez in Teardrop Park in Lower Manhattan was about thinking about the land we were walking on; it was also about slowing down and seeing. Before we started, we performed a movement at Gutierrez’s instruction in which our outstretched arms cupped and scooped the air forwards and backwards.
For him the action could do many things; it could be a conjuring gesture or it could contain the idea of conjuring. It could be about moving or banishing energy. He spoke of waving as a gesture of awakening: “Healing”, he sang, “there is no space for oblivion”.
At a time when it looks like a lot of people have pushed the past year and a half out of their heads, the gesture was grounding and reassuring. It also echoed: as we walked towards the park, two children were seen in a high-rise apartment with their arms curled in the same meditative slow motion; they stood behind a window, but their attention – they watched, they copied, they moved with us – made the procession important even before it really began.
Moving as a collective, especially after so much loneliness, has a hypnotic effect. This idea of togetherness was the focus of the Global Water Dances 2021 in Locomotive Lawn in Riverside Park South in June, which drew attention to the cause of clean and safe water with movement. Martha Eddy, the dance teacher and one of the coordinators of the event, helped lead a dance in which participants, dancers and spectators alike made waves with their bodies.
“You’re starting to feel harmony,” Eddy said of the liberating power of moving with others. “And we build a kind of collective effervescence that both senses fear and releases joy in what humanity can create.”
But I’ve found that effervescence isn’t just about large groups; it’s not even about being outside. In a series of individual performances, dance artist Kay Ottinger played a solo by Melanie Maar as part of a larger project that she initiated with three mentors. Everyone passes on an exercise or a piece. For Maars Solo, Ottinger turned her body with a heavy wooden pearl necklace that was wrapped around her waist. As she circled her hips for 20 minutes, she rocked back and forth, transforming the room, a dingy studio in Judson Church, and the air in it.
There is something priceless about live performances: the energetic exchange between a dancing body and a quiet and attentive body. Mirror neurons – how a brain cell reacts to an action, either when it is performed or simply observed – are charged. I felt that with Ottinger and in “Embodied Sensations”, a participatory work by the Chicago-based artist Amanda Williams. Williams is trained as an architect and takes care of space; Her piece was one of my favorite experiences of bodies in space – and my body in space – of the past year.
Williams teamed up with Anna Martine Whitehead, a performance artist from Chicago, for “Embodied Sensations”, which is presented in the huge atrium of the Museum of Modern Art; The spectator’s job was to perform movement instructions amid a maze of piled furniture – benches and chairs that had been removed from parts of the museum due to social distancing protocols.
Each performance consisted of four prompts, which the audience performed twice over 30 minutes. One of me was, “Take three full minutes to do absolutely whatever you want in this room.” Another was more direct: “Imagine there is a black hole in the center of this room. Go to the edge of the black hole and practice resisting its pull. “
If the pandemic raised our awareness of our bodies, “Embodied Sensations” was a way to find out who has the freedom of movement and why. One instruction read in part: “Imagine you are a walking goal post or a moving target. Decide if you want to be caught. “
In an interview, Williams said, “I can imagine what my brother’s answer would be, what my 7-year-old’s answer would be, what my upper-middle-class white classmate would be from Cornell’s answer. Then it was incredible to see these people perform. “
But even when the instructions were less burdened, their execution had levels of meaning. During the first lap, I felt like I was carrying out the instructions; the second time I just did it and that had a relaxing effect. I was in space, wearing a mask, and could breathe. Deep.
Meanwhile, certain instructions were reminiscent of moments from the pandemic experience: “Choose any room,” one read. “Close your eyes, hear and smell intensely for about 2 minutes. Choose a new place and keep your eyes closed. Focus on how you are feeling for a minute. Repeat this even if you are bored or tired. “
In the past year and a half, haven’t we all been bored and tired? Alone with our feelings? Without the space to move much, we looked inward, at the body. And for those of us who normally see a lot of live performances, we had to pay attention to the bigger world – the angles in nature, the choreography of the everyday. Both were gifts. Now there is little shortage of dance events, and here are two: STooPS BedStuy, an annual arts event, takes place on July 24th; On August 7th, Dance Church, a guided improvisation class from Seattle, is making a tour stop in New York.
Or borrow a re-entry experiment from Williams. Close your eyes. Focus on how you feel. And then repeat. Think about how your body, not just buildings, ends up in the air. It’s about enjoying the in-between.
