Dancing With Myself

This year, I swapped the spacious, Marley-floored studios on my university’s campus for the 80-square-foot (minus furniture) living room of the apartment I share with three other women. Yesterday, in the span of one 85-minute dance class, I managed to kick our couch five times and almost knocked over my roommate’s printer. The carpeted floor is less than ideal for turning, and my feet are perpetually freezing because of our drafty windows and the fact that our radiators only work about thirty percent of the time. 

It’s not just the change of physical space that has made this year so much more difficult-- it’s the lack of shared physicality. My favorite part of dance classes, modern dance in particular, is the interactions between dancers, the ebb and flow of the energy in the room, the possibility of touch, even if it never happens. If you’ve ever been part of a dance class, or even a workout class, you know how important the cultivation of shared energy is to a successful session. To be in a large group of people with their minds set on the same goal, aware of others but not judging them, is something that I have sorely missed during the pandemic. 

This is what has made up exactly half of my college dance education: wiggling alone in a space I share with others while those others wonder what the hell those sounds are coming from the other room (my new modern teacher is a big proponent of breath techniques and slapping yourself to warm up your muscles). For anybody that doesn’t live alone, the audience of other dancers and the teachers, an audience that understands what you’re trying to accomplish, is replaced by the possibility of being walked in on and caught in an embarrassing position or exercise by a parent or friend. This alone is enough to put me on edge. Filmed classes also make retrospective criticism more possible, and hamper the ability to let go of mistakes that are now recorded for eternity on someone’s iCloud. 

Without the studio, without touch, dance becomes difficult to reconcile with the disorienting flurry of the outside world. For those of us who use movement as an escape, the studio offered a degree of physical separation as well as a kind of sanctuary. It’s hard to escape when your living, eating, working, and dancing spaces are all the same room. 

At the same time, such limited space has rendered my dancing down like the fat on a cut of meat, making it more adaptive and introspective and allowing it to shed the expectations of the audience--myself in the mirror--at least, in the moment. It leaves room for experiencing your body you live in, in the space that you live in, without being preoccupied with daily mundane tasks. For me at least, participating in dance during the pandemic, as weird as it has proved to be, is a welcome break from my desk chair, laptop, and painted-on Zoom smile. Ironically, the pretense of interested nods and obligatory participation in academic subjects hasn’t been able to permeate my performing arts bubble. 

Choreographing over Zoom, which I did for my dance company at school, wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, although it was hard to keep dancers accountable for attendance and difficult to fit my five foot ten frame on the screen to demonstrate. Of course, we would all much rather be in person, but the online format circumvented the tedious process of reserving studio space and allowed for some creativity in the video editing department. Still, it was difficult to connect with my cast with the screen and miles between us. No amount of icebreakers--not even, “If you were a type of potato, what type would you be?”--could be a substitute for the giggles, mishaps, and happy exhaustion of late-night rehearsals. 

Incredible artists have continued, against all odds, to produce incredible work, whether virtually or in small, COVID-safe groups. Even without the funding derived from ticket sales, companies such as Alvin Ailey and Dance Theater of Harlem have put together projects for the consumption of a public that isn’t necessarily giving back to them. As sports continue as usual with the exception of eerie cardboard crowds, the arts continue to scrape from their already hollowed-out reserve of funds, energy, and sacrifice. Collegiate dancers, professional dancers, home studio owners, Broadway performers, and countless other groups that rely on the magic of an in-person experience to earn a living or find meaning in their lives have been stripped of jobs and resources. 

As positive as I strive to be about the reality of dancing, teaching, and choreographing over Zoom, the truth is that this approach isn’t sustainable. Although some forms of art can survive literally and figuratively untouched for hundreds of years, the living, breathing form of dance needs to be shaped by human hands. I will embrace the online process for as long as I need to, but I won’t pretend that it’s as fulfilling as the real thing.