Life as a Modern Dancer

In Batsheva’s YAG, It’s A Family Affair

Igor Ptashenchuk, Yonatan Simon, Hani Sirois, Londiwe Khosa, Yael Ben Ezer, and Sean Howe in YAG.

In Batsheva’s YAG, It’s A Family Affair

By Garth Grimball

“Once my family loved, really loved, really really loved to dance.”

This is the thesis statement of YAG, spoken by each of the six cast members in an exploration of familial relations and heritage. Created for the stage by Ohad Naharin in 1996, this is Batsheva’s first production adapted especially for the screen; presented and streaming via the Joyce Theater. Yael Ben Ezer, Sean Howe, Londiwe Khoza, Igor Ptashenchuk, Yoni Simon, and Hani Sirkis dance with a commitment to those words. Playing family is easy. Moving as an ensemble is tough. The world building in this dance succeeds by the coherence and chemistry of the cast.

The cinematography by Roee Shalti is superb. The entire production is filmed on a proscenium stage. The lighting design is one look. The images move from the screen into the mind without the barrier of showy effects or angles. Each close up is earned. I never felt I was missing part of the choreography beyond the frame even when unseen actions are evident. After a year of reviewing, watching, interacting with online dance, a personal barometer for quality is how often I feel the urge to lift my hand over to the trackpad and drag the mouse to the bottom of the window to see how much time is left. During YAG the urge was absent. For 45 minutes my attention was rapt in the translation of this concert dance to the screen.

On the topic of urges, the sexual politics present in much of Naharin’s work leaves me with a sense of horniness unsatisfied. The choreographic tension builds on hormonal bounty. The dancers’ bodies feint and parry like gladiators commanded to abstain before a match. Simon and Ptashenchuk graze the inner thighs of Khoza with their ears before being pulled into the groin. Simon jumps atop a rectangular orange plank held from underneath by a naked Ptashenchuk. While the work has an arc, there’s an avoidance of climax.

Sean Howe, Igor Ptashenchuk, and Yael Ben Ezer in YAG.

This is not to say YAG is without nuance. Other than the plank/door/barrier, there is a prop use striking in its simplicity and symbolic effect. Sirkis walks backwards placing fortune cookies like ducks in a row on a diagonal across the stage. Several feet behind, Ezer walks forward crushing the cookies with every step. Fortunes are made and lost passed down through generations. The remains of the sugary prophecies cover the floor adhering to the dancers like inheritances material and immaterial.

The choreography moves within confrontation, slight to extreme. Naharin’s direction confronts the implicit agreement of a fourth wall. The dancers look directly into the camera often, usually when speaking. Are they telling us? Or inside the direct gaze is the internal monologue revealed? Together, Naharin and Shalti, keep the kinesthetic alive on the screen. The edits feature the effort of dancing even if the cast make it look effortless. Wide (almost cruel in their width) deep fourth positions, accumulating gestures, spasms with the intensity of electrical shocks, and caresses that become shoves, expose the relational currents in this family.

Once I loved, really loved, really really loved to watch live dance; to be part of an audience. I am in awe of how concert dance shifted to the virtual stage over this past year. YAG is an exemplary product of the shift. I can’t wait to live in that love again, live. Until then, I know the heritage of dance is alive, on and off the screen.

Hani Sirois, Londiwe Khosa, and Yael Ben Ezer in YAG.

 

YAG is streaming via joyce.org May 27 - June 2, 2021.

Garth Grimball is a writer and dance artist based in Oakland, California. He is co-director of Wax Poet(s) and hosts the podcast Reference Desk.

 

An Afternoon Walk and Dance Through Glen Canyon Park: FACT/SF’s “Diffusion”

Erin Yen and Emily Hansel (background), Samuel Melecio-Zambrano and Katherine Neumann (foreground). Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

An Afternoon Walk and Dance Through Glen Canyon Park: FACT/SF’s "Diffusion"

By Molly Rose-Williams

It’s been over a year since theaters around the Bay Area shut their doors. Like much of the rest of our lives, art-making and performance have migrated online or outside. Last Saturday, FACT/SF’s newest work, “Diffusion,” brought me for the first time to San Francisco’s Glen Canyon Park. The show mapped a 45-minute loop into the canyon and back. Along our walk, dancers peopled the canyon walls, peaks, and pathways like open-armed invitations to notice. Notice the dancing, but also the canyon itself—the plants, animals, red stone and bright blue sky, and the many park goers with whom we shared the experience. 

After the show, I got to chat with Charlie Slender-White, FACT/SF’s director (another novel feature of the COVID-era dance show—small audience sizes that allow the artists to personally connect with everyone who comes!). He shared that although these outdoor spaces have always been available for dancing, it wasn’t until COVID forced us outside that he felt drawn to create in them. “It always seemed too complicated,” he reflected. “What if someone walks through the piece? What if there’s another event that’s distracting? What if a dog won’t stop barking?”

Creating “Diffusion” has shown him that it really isn’t complicated at all. Instead, it’s felt like an opportunity to move with what’s available. As an audience member, this type of immersion in a public landscape feels vastly different than the tightly curated attention of a dark theater. My experience of the show was just as much about the dancing as about the landscape in which it took place. My reflection below responds to this holistic immersion and round awareness. I hope in reading it, you can share even a fraction of the pleasure I found in experiencing “Diffusion.”

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I’m standing on the cement path at the mouth of Glen Canyon Park. It’s a piercing blue day. Clusters of smiling people lounge on the sunny field to my left. Shrieks of glee float from the playground to my right. Other dance-goers gather around me. Charlie, the director, wears a fuschia shirt and bright red socks. He greets us each by name, and checks us in on his phone. On the far side of the field, a raucous yell rises from a volleyball court as one player spikes the ball over a taut black net. 

All of a sudden, six dancers take off at a run across the field. Fuschia shirts bob, red socks pump, in a perfect single file line. A family of picnickers look up from their sandwiches as the runners approach. The oldest picnicker (Dad?) chews slowly as he tracks the runners’ progress around their blanket. The three kids stare, jaws agape, as the runners close the loop and sprint towards the volleyball game. The family dog scoots towards the youngest child’s sandwich, but Dad swats Dog away before it can grab the big slab of bread and meat hanging limp in the child’s hands. The child just stares, hypnotized by the runners’ retreating backs.

The dancers continue to wind across the field, cutting curving paths like neon intestines. Now they come towards us, their official audience. “I have no idea what they’re doing,” a girl announces in a loud whisper behind me. The line of five bobs past her to climb the steep street bordering the park. “Whoa,” she says. We stream uphill in pursuit. 

The street is steeper than it looks. I wonder if the dancers’ calves burn like mine.

“That donut may have gotten me,” a fellow audience member moans as we climb the sun-drenched pavement. He outlines his current dietary allowances to his friend as we turn onto a shady path. “Goat milk, sheep cheese, and RICE. I’m obsessed with rice.”

Six fuschia dancers stand on a grassy golden hill up ahead. Two move with crane-like swoops through the grass. Four stand like sentries on the wood and dirt staircase carved into the canyon wall. With their black masks and matching outfits, the dancers appear almost more archetypal than human. The sentries split, two of them sprinting up the stairs, and two leaping onto the path in front of us in clouds of dust. The pathway dancers swing like a Newton’s cradle, back and forth, back and forth, hips low to the ground.

“C’mon man, it’s a dance,” murmurs a passerby as he tries to coax his lumpy yellow dog past the dancers’ sweeping movements. But the dog winds, as if drunk, directly into the taller dancers’ feet. The dancer leaps with catlike precision over the dog’s bowed back, taking off at a run down the path. A jogger in neon yellow appears like a mirage to follow him. The crane dancers swoop off the hill to follow the jogger.  

We keep moving up the path. Above, the climbing sentries reach the canyon’s jagged lip. They look barely larger than my index finger as they peer down. A pair of hawks soar above them in perfect unison.

Wiley Naman Strasser (left), Eric Garcia (middle), Meegan Hertensteiner (right). Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

Two dancers eat up space on a wooden bridge, spiraling as if hungry for sensation. Their feet scrape out a rhythmic soundtrack on the rocky path and hollow bridge wood. We pass through a tunnel of curly willow that echoes with birdsong. My skin buzzes with delight.

We emerge in a clearing dwarfed by a sharp grey peak jutting like teeth from the ground. Three fuschia dancers wave like synchronous windmills on top of the rocks. A hiker in head-to-toe blue pops out to join them. He whips out his phone with a practiced arm and films their airy movements.

Below them, a little girl in a light pink dress wanders across the scene. “Mommy,” she announces, “I forgot to tell you, this place has lots of pine nuts!”

“Cool,” her mom sighs as she huffs behind her up the path. 

We all chuckle.

I crane my neck like a magnet to the sky as we retrace our steps through the willow tunnel. A hummingbird flits overhead. At the bridge, three dancers bathe us in the sounds of their feet dragging along the path as they make wide, arcing movements over the dirt. Three more dancers join them, balancing in utter silence atop the thin wooden ledge of a retaining wall. They move their arms with blade-like precision, opening and closing their chests as if carving out a novel dimension. 

Three passersby stop to watch. 

“You’re my best friend,” one professes to another as we follow the dancers’ retreat towards the mouth of the canyon. 

We stop at a small lawn to witness three dancers hopping in perfect unison like birds on hot coals. Then we pass a woman who drops a very small piece of paper, bends to pick it up, and then drops it again. I don’t see if she ever manages to keep it in her pocket because a crowd of hikers in leggings and visors tromps between us.

Finally, we emerge at the field where we first gathered. The volleyball game is long over, but the family of picnickers is still there. Dad swats the dog away from the bag of chips slipping off the youngest child’s lap.

Above it all, four dancers climb a set of steep stairs backwards towards the street. They each wave a long streamer as if in farewell. A man at a picnic table on my right gazes wide-mouthed at the image, his neck snapping back and forth between us and the retreating dancers. “It’s a dance,” I consider explaining, but then decide against it. I’m part of this dance too, after all, and I’m pretty sure that’s not part of my role.

Samuel Melecio-Zambrano (left) and Katherine Neumann (right). Photo by Robbie Sweeny.


Molly Rose-Williams is a dance artist, writer, educator and community arts organizer from the San Francisco Bay Area. You can read more of her writing and learn about her work at www.mollyrosewilliams.com.

 

A Moveable Dance from LA Dance Project

 

A Moveable Dance from LA Dance Project
By Garth Grimball

Four bodies appear from the emptiness cast by a building’s corner. They dance in unison. Between them the space stays equal. Faces masked and bodies covered in loose, transparent overcoats, their forms disintegrate before outlines snap into being. The unison ends, the energy diffuses into overlapping mini-events, changing place and changing the place. “The Betweens,” a new work commissioned by LA Dance Project from Jermaine Spivey and Spenser Theberge, questions stability in body and site. 

“The Betweens” is the first online dance I’ve watched twice. One, because I liked it; two, because I struggled to put my experience into words and the internet allows multiple viewings. On theme, by coincidence, my viewings took place in two different states, Florida and South Carolina, 48 hours apart.* In Gulfport, Florida, I watched from my dad’s home office/meditation room. In Charleston, South Carolina, I laid on the guest room bed in my aunt and uncle’s house with my computer on my belly. Because of the internet my change in location changed nothing about the performance. Because of the internet my change in location actualizes the performance’s ubiquity. “The Betweens” remained the same unaffected by time and place. The stability of the medium sharpens the content of the work.

LADP dancers, David Adrian Freeland Jr, Mario Gonzalez, Yusha-Marie Sorzano, and Naomi Van Brunt, perform with remarkable timing in what appears to be a 30-minute single take film. The piece combines Dada playfulness and Brechtian commentary. With a drag affect Freeland shares the throughline of the work: “displacement, replacement, engagement.” The cast interrupts each other in movement and language never settling into a single idea or spot. Words repeated and reformed morph into abstraction. Bodies slide through emotional territories - uncertainty, confidence, neediness, calm - as if a personality test were mapped onto the physical space. The bland parking lot setting could be anywhere except for a few regional specifics: cinder block walls, a glimpse of palm trees, the cotton-mouthed light of Southern California. Whether it’s whale sounds or R&B grooves, Maxwell Transue’s original score folds in between the speech patterns of the dancers. It feels appropriate to detail the contours of “The Betweens” rather than describe beat-by-beat moments. To do that would sacrifice the work’s avoidance of pandering or relying on the meme-ification of discourse. 

I wish I could praise Trevor Tweeten, the Director of Photography, in person. His filming was so thoughtful, so inside the logic of the work. The visual tone shifts from participatory to voyeuristic to omniscient seamlessly. “The Betweens” was commissioned as part of the Drive-In Dances series but the filmed version isn’t a recording of a live event, it is a true dance film.

The piece ends with an opening. Sorzano opens a gate and follows a dancing Freeland out of the space and out of frame. Cars zoom down the road. “The Betweens” is specific and roomy. It is of the moment and it allows an aesthetic distance from the familiar. It will stay with me no matter what state I am in.  

 

*COVID - era notice: My trip was a family visit. We are vaccinated.

Garth Grimball is a writer and dance artist based in Oakland. He is co-director of Wax Poet(s) and hosts the podcast Reference Desk.

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Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company and Categorizing Dance on Camera

Nick Blaylock in Full View. Photo by Marissa Mooney.

 

Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company and Categorizing Dance on Camera

By Garth Grimball

 

How many categories are there for a dance experienced via screen? Dance film. Screen dance. Live streaming dance event. Previously recorded performance. TikTok. The categories bloom and wilt without capturing the aura of the work. Or do the categories suffice but we critics are still trying to review the dance and not the film/screen/stream/recording?  Daniel Charon, artistic director of Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, introduced opening night of the mixed-bill program Home Run as a “screen dance, mini film festival” with a “live, durational installation piece.” A lot of categories to contend with, and contend with them I will, categorically. 

Megan McCarthy in Woes. Photo by Daniel Charon.

Woes - Weather Report

The only live piece on the program, Woes, opened and closed the evening and served as transitional viewing between the pre-recorded content. Charon told us we’d be “checking in on them” throughout the evening. The phrase brought to mind a news anchor passing to the meteorologist: And now to Dominica Greene and Megan McCarthy with the improv. Dominica and Megan, what can you tell us?  Choreographically Woes was like a storm brewing. Greene and McCarthy folded and unfolded their bodies, clad in white jumpsuits, on a stage delineated by squares of paint. Smeared, the suits turned from cumulus to storm clouds. At the end the two touch for the first time and it’s like a thunderclap. 

The cast of Winter's Light. Photo by Daniel Charon.

Winter’s Light - Music Video

Oh, the empty warehouse. Is there another location so beloved aesthetically by choreographers and music video directors? The columns, the giant windows, the eerie spareness. In another time Charon’s choice of setting would feel overdone. Now it’s understood as a spatial necessity. The sextet weaves in and out of solos, duets, and group dancing without touching, all masked. The absence of touch and the space between dancers are addressed intentionally, not as an obstacle, in Charon’s deft choreography. Gestures of measuring become a motif. The camera plays with wide angle shots emphasizing an isolation felt inside with others.

Nicholas Jurica and Corinne Lohner in Don't Chew With Your Mouth Open. Photo by Alec Lyons.

Don’t Chew With Your Mouth Open - Mumblecore Indie Movie/American Apparel ad

This feels like those movies that “elevate mood over plot” but are really an excuse to watch beautiful people bump into each other. In this case the bumping is literal. Don’t Chew has the visual vocabulary of Sofia Coppola and the sensation of watching an inside joke. 

Wash created by Stanley and Judith Hallett and directed by Joan Woodbury

Wash (excerpt, 1970) - Experimental, now artistic archaeology

Was anyone else unsettled as a child watching Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory when the boat enters the bad-acid-trip tunnel? Wash has a similar vibe. Footage of a car wash, traffic, and dancer silhouettes are superimposed in hyper-saturated reds and oranges. What was once cutting edge technology applied to “be about something” offers a relativity check on how work made today may be viewed in 50 years.

Bashaun Williams and Fausto Rivera in And Again. Photo by Wonderstone Pictures.

And Again - Dance Film

This duet from Bashaun Williams and Fausto Rivera fits most in the Dance Film category of the program - like a visual essay with a thesis and conclusion. The choreography is mirroring-unison and solos. The camera shifts between third-person and first-person points of view adding intimacy to the duet. The dance ends with an embrace. The camera lingers documenting a sensation we all hope to feel again.

Full View - Teaser from Melissa Younker on Vimeo.

Full View - Video Art

The highest budget work has the most DIY sensibility. In the tradition of Nam June Paik and Meredith Monk, Full View has an elaborate set piece and a relatively fixed vantage point. The overall conceit is a prompt realized: Dance Your Quarantine Journey. Eleven dancers (RWDC + Heartland Collective) perform solos in front of a monochrome avocado green living room set. A cloud floats above changing hue like a mood ring. The dancers wear bright colors adding extra pop to their energetic seesawing. It has the visual flavor of immersive art exhibits but with substance instead of selfies. The creative team, led by Molly Heller and Wonderstone Films, use color to elicit the confinement and mania shared in pandemic living. The dancers provide the personal, the private, the feelings maybe we don’t want to admit even to ourselves.

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Dance online granted me the opportunity to be in Oakland and experience this Salt Lake City based company for the first time. Kudos to Daniel Charon and Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company for curating a program of dance online that considers the medium. Each piece has a different relationship to the lens and therefore to the viewer. As an exploration of dance making and sharing in a time when we’re stuck at home, Home Run lives up to its name.

Home Run is available for On-Demand streaming through March 13, 2021. Tickets available here.

Garth Grimball is a writer and dance artist based in Oakland. He is co-director of Wax Poet(s) and hosts the podcast Reference Desk.

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Related posts:

Woodland Creatures, Summer Dance By Garth Grimball

FINDING (HEART): Practices in Improvisation (& Practices in Improvisational Writing) By Molly Heller

My Dance Week: Daniel Charon, Artistic Director of Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company

Artist Profile: Joan Woodbury

Artist Profile: Shirley Ririe

 

Virtual Healing with RAWdance

Photo by Del Medoff

Virtual Healing with RAWdance

By Garth Grimball

The Bay Area is entering the 11th month of quarantine/lockdown/shelter-in-place/life with COVID-19. At the beginning of this week California Governor Gavin Newsom announced the current six weeks of sheltering-in-place was coming to an end and counties can “re-open” to varying degrees. At the end of this week RAWdance premiered “The Healer,” choreographed by co-artistic director Katerina Wong and co-presented by ODC Theater. The performing arts are so far from reopening that the adventures in internet-as-stage continue to evolve.

“The Healer” sets itself apart from other online dance before the performance begins streaming. Ticket holders can receive a care package of items related to Traditional Chinese Medicine, a source of choreographic inspiration. A bamboo fan, peppermint tea, ginger candy, a sachet of lavender, and wishing tree notes invite viewers to experience “The Healer” with all their senses. Holding my cup of tea I logged on to the streaming site. Digital verisimilitude extends to pre-show socializing. Rather than fleeting small talk with fellow attendees as you find your seat, now announce your presence in a chat window and share an emoji or ten. :) My glasses fog as I blow on my tea and the audience turns into a stream of ink blots.

In lieu of the mixed-bill program planned for 10 months ago, “The Healer” is now experienced in a lecture-demonstration format. Each night a different speaker preambles the dance film. On opening night it was acupuncturist Shawna Seth discussing TCM and the creative process. Informative, persuasive, and aspirational, her presentation had the familiar rhythm of TED Talks. Seth ended teaching an acupressure exercise to relieve stress; bringing us back to our physical selves as we came together virtually.

Photo by Del Medoff

“The Healer” opens with a montage of women opening doors, entering spaces, removing shoes, and washing hands. Considering the critical public health pressure and awareness to always be washing one’s hands it’s uncertain whether Wong is commenting on this collective necessity or encouraging a collective cleansing separate from the recommended 20 second lather. The montage settles on the ODC stage where the dancers, Wong, Michaela Cruze, Juliann Witt, and Stacey Yuen, engage with a set by Chad Owens. In the foreground stands a sanctum. A water source and a medicine bowl center the bamboo structure bringing the outside inside. A bamboo row cascades across the background. My familiarity with ODC Theater as performer and audience member increased my desire to melt into the screen and reanimate on the other side. I know the feeling of my feet on the stage, the daze of leaving dreamy stage lighting to unflattering halogen in the green room. I’m grateful to see the theater used and the stage danced on.

The dancers move with power. Each has a solo within the tightly structured quartet. Daniel Berkman’s original score contains intermittent voice over from a Qi Gong instructor. The dancers respond in kind or let her words float away unanswered. The choreography has a very Bay Area sensibility: a combination of ballet and release techniques with a distinct inspiration source and a judicious amount of throwing oneself to the floor. The sensibility can feel like a flavor profile that’s dulled from overuse. Wong excites when the movement vocabulary leans into her inspirations. One inspiration source is Qi, and as Seth informed us, its movement within the body’s channels. The alchemy of contemporary dance and Qi movements shines brightest in Wong’s solo. Her movements are accented by exacting breaths. The other dancers join her tearing across the stage in unison and I feel the energy come off my screen. Or, I want to feel that energy. At one point the dancers fuse. Hands settle and sense eschewing the grabs, holds, and muscling of dance partnering. The four bodies create a visual embodiment of energy channels.

The screen went dark. My tea was cold. I stared at my three wishing tree notes. Is it ok to write the same wish 3 times? Please let it not be another 11 months before these dancers, all dancers, can hear the applause.

Garth Grimball is a writer and dance artist based in Oakland. He is co-director of Wax Poet(s) and hosts the podcast Reference Desk.

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Related posts:

“Still Dancing”: The Dancers of RAWdance on Working on “The Healer” in the Age of Quarantine

One Good Quote: "The Healer" with RAWdance

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With Appreciation and Admiration: A Few Musings on "Utopia"

Screenshot from Utopia, capturing the 9 actors in the production

 

With Appreciation and Admiration: A Few Musings on Utopia

By Jill Randall

Eight months into quarantine life as a dancer, I have dabbled in a few online art experiments, as an audience member a handful of times and by producing two projects. We long for those moments of escape, of delight, and of a small taste of hope. Cutting Ball Theater’s online premiere of Utopia got me to feel, see, and experience in ways I have not in so long. Thank you.

Utopia is a brand new play by Charles L. Mee. Maximizing the online format - the play is masterfully edited with split screens, Brady Bunch squares, sound effects, and interwoven visual art. The project brought together Cutting Ball Theater with RAWdance and Creativity Explored. 

The vignettes, non sequitur transitions, and patchwork of stories is reminiscent of childhood memories of episodes of The Electric Company and stories of Dr. Seuss. Whimsy, humor, absurdity, and poetic language are maximized here, but don’t be fooled. The deep themes of love, relationships, and dreams are still present. 

Dancer Michaela Cruze. Photo by Hillary Goidell.

The show is 75 minutes in length. For the first 50 minutes, there are a few glimpses of dancers and movement interludes to whet your appetite. Personally, I would have liked these early dancing scenes to last an ounce longer (like 60 seconds versus 30 seconds in length). Around 50 minutes into the play, the dance section kicks into full force and lasts for the rest of the production (nearly 25 minutes in length).

We go from the play (actors, words, and frontal film close ups) to an ensemble of 7 dancers all filmed outside in San Francisco. We move into full bodied movement and filming the whole body. 

The modern dance form was perfect for this play. Abstraction, juxtaposition, and gestures were all totally at home in Utopia. Katerina (Katie) Wong’s choreography brought the themes and characters of the play into the “real world” outside. The dancers scan and see, change directions, change levels, bounce, extend, and spill over into forward spinal curves. The choreographic phrases bring forth the theme of inertia; once in motion, you stay in motion.

Dancer Jhia Jackson. Photo by Hillary Goidell.

Due to COVID-19, the dancers are masked at all times. While this does still feel odd to view in professional performances, even 8 months into quarantine, the audience’s eye gets used to it after a few minutes. This is our true reality and masked existence.

Wong’s choreography echoes the delight and whimsy of the first section of the play with the cast of actors. But she literally and metaphorically puts the ideas in motion - to keep going, to persist, to find humor and delight and look outside ourselves. The structure of Utopia reminds me of Crystal Pite’s master work Betroffenheit, whose first section is layered with text, dancing, acting, and props, and then section two heads into abstraction and full bodied choreography without text. 

Dance ensemble from left to right: Kelly Del Rosario, Juliann Witt, Jhia Jackson, Katerina Wong, Nick Wagner, and Michaela Cruze. (Dancer Stacey Yuen not pictured here.) Photo by Hillary Goidell.

Logistically, I am in awe of the feat of pulling off this production during our socially distant existence. The craft and blocking of the scenes, building an ensemble, and pulling together so many cast members, props, colors, and throughlines…...I have deep appreciation and admiration for the creative team. 

Diving into this project, taking it on, and pulling it off - a symbol of creativity and the magic that art truly brings to our lives as artists and audience members alike….thank you.

Utopia runs for only one more day via Vimeo. Stream it now! (If you purchase it today, on November 15th, you will have access for 7 days to watch it.)

Jill Randall is the Artistic Director of Shawl-Anderson Dance Center in Berkeley, CA and Director of the Life as a Modern Dancer Blog.

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"State of Darkness" and the Internet of Dance

Annique Roberts. Photo by Mohamad Sadek.

State of Darkness and the Internet of Dance

By Garth Grimball

Reproduction is beautiful. Reproduction is corrosive. The bonding of animals through sex to create new life is miraculous. Copying someone else’s intellectual property is unethical, illegal. The former is a welcoming of the new. The latter is a dissolution of what was new. Dance embraces the duality of reproduction more so than any other art form. How many bodies have inhabited Ailey’s Revelations or Petipa’s Swan Lake reproducing the steps with every performance? Yet unlike live theater and music, there is no artifact to claim as original, to defend as the primary source. Live dance is always making anew. And then, the internet.

From Oct 24 - Nov 1, the Joyce Theater livestreamed seven dancers performing State of Darkness, Molissa Fenley’s seminal 1988 solo dance to Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps. Solo dances are the de facto choreography within pandemic health guidelines, and the Joyce is the first presenter to reproduce an existing solo that dances at the center of the internet, “live” experience, and reproduction. I watched all 7 performances totaling 4 hours and 5 minutes.

Since its 1913 premiere choreographers have wrestled with Stravinsky’s symphonic beast. But the music is saved from oversaturation. Using rhythm over melody in storytelling, the score hasn’t been sacrificed to the gods of capitalism like Tchaikovsky or Vivaldi. No jingle to hawk holiday wares is born out of Le sacre’s polyphony. Fenley’s choreography is similarly familiar and entirely its own. For over forty years she has crafted her own style of movement that reflects her youth in Nigeria and Spain and her ascendancy in the downtown New York dance scene of the 1980s. Her choreography is her: energetic, thoughtful, complex. Movement you can easily put a name to, say a kick or an arabesque, acquires an inflection point or a change of force making it different and unique in Fenley’s vocabulary.

Michael Trusnovec. Photo by Mohamad Sadek.

The seven dancers, Michael Trusnovec, Jared Brown, Annique Roberts, Shamel Pitts, Lloyd Knight, Cassandra Trenary, and Sara Mearns, all have different training backgrounds which makes their relationship to the choreography unifying and not repetitive. Each dancer reproduces Fenley in the choreography. In every performance I see a different element of her and of the performer’s individuality. Like Woody Allen directing every male protagonist to perform him (minus the narcissism and sexual predation). Every dancer is in some way performing the dance and performing Fenley. The rare opportunity afforded by the internet to see 7 interpretations of one dance so close in time transcends the streaming of theater dance to an internet of dance. Like dances on TikTok or Instagram, the viewer can see the dance spread and deepen in the dancers’ bodies and on the medium, the screen, as it transforms body to body in real time. The solo becomes a pas de deux between each dancer and Fenley, balancing integrity and interpretation. As artist Hito Steyerl says, the “aura is no longer based on the permanence of the ‘original,’ but on the transience of the copy.” Dance, the most impermanent of the arts, reckons with transience as the pandemic requires a new mediated relationship with the viewer.

At the risk of reducing the awesome work and artistry to superlatives, each performer has standout qualities in interpreting and reproducing the solo. Trusnovec’s connection to the earth; Brown’s fluidity and storytelling; Roberts’s calm and expressive gestures; Pitts’s looseness and freedom in space; Knight’s internal force; Trenary’s precision; Mearns’s musicality and fire. State of Darkness removes the veneer of dance as effortless. The close-ups available in livestreaming highlight the sweat, the nostrils flaring, the rapid expansion of the rib cage. The camera as intermediary adds a heightened sense of physicality even as it flattens dimensions.

When the last note strikes and the dancer steps into a pool of light the curtain of the Joyce theater closes and opens for a silent bow. Each time I found myself clapping at the screen yearning to shout my enthusiasm from inside the theater. Inside the screen the seven faces are a collage of exhaustion, relief, gratitude. Mearns, the last performer, bowed and collapsed on the floor in tears. The Joyce, Fenley, and the dancers create a new experience of dance, a reproduction that doesn’t dissolve. To an empty theater and screens across the world the humanity of dance is on display.

State of Darkness at the Joyce is available to stream through Nov 7, 2020 at joyce.org. $12 per dancer.

 

 

Garth Grimball is a writer and dance artist based in Oakland, CA. He hosts the podcast Reference Desk and is co-director of Wax Poet(s).

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Shift into Queer Time

Screenshot from "Borderlessbodies, Transsoils" by Río Saúl

Shift into Queer Time

By Aiano Nakagawa

Today's writing explores the 2nd Annual Queering Dance Festival, presented by Shawl-Anderson Dance Center in Berkeley, California. The 2020 iteration took place on September 19 and 20, 2020 on Twitch, with both live and pre-recorded pieces. Nakagawa reflects on the September 19th performance. 

I think we can agree: we are not living in “normal times.” In the midst of this global pandemic, civil uprising in response to hundreds of years of a white supremacist reign, and our collective’s response to the growing powers of a fascist regime, I have been questioning, “What is normal?” Realizing that I have no desire for a return to “normal,” as defined by the old world ruled by wealthy, cishet, white men. But we’ve already transitioned into the new world order, and that begs the question: What do I want to bring with me from the old world? What still holds true?

As I cozied up in my partner’s bed, ready to tune in to the Queering Dance Festival, I was met with some sadness around not being at an in-person venue, able to embrace my community with soft arms and a big smile. In the same breath, I was excited and curious about what possibilities and new realities would emerge within the creative confines of an online dance festival. One such possibility I noticed right away, was that unlike in years past, people from all over the world were able to tune in and witness these Queer artists sharing their creations in all their strength, power, and uniqueness. 

As the program began, I was reminded of the questions I have been asking myself through this period of quarantine and keeping physical distance. “What do I want to bring with me from the old world? What still holds true?” At the center of my musings has been time, but not as we’ve known it before. I’m talking a slow, sensual, expansive time - outside of the 9-5, 40/hour workweek grind so many of us had become accustomed to. This sense of expansive time was illustrated by each artist, helping me feel less alone in my own mind. 

In "The Living Database," Zoe Huey and Nicole Maimon investigated the nature of relationships across time and space - what and how do we build intimacy between people, when our physical bodies are not together? This is something I’ve been thinking lots about. In the creation of their tender and sweet archives to one another, they demonstrate the practice of listening to time within the body, of indulging in the pleasure of stillness, and trusting that they are in the process of creating something together.

"Borderlessbodies, Transsoils" begins as Río Saúl walks in a circle, pouring dirt from the Earth in what feels like a ceremonial sacred way. Invoking memories of their grandfather, calling to ancestral notions of time that span beyond our present bodies in all directions. Reminding me of the vast history (hidden and celebrated) of the Queer people who have existed in urban and rural spaces, out in the open or solely in their hearts. Their work begged me to reflect on the relationship between time, body, land, and ancestors - all inextricably linked, yet understood by so many as separate entities. 

Screenshot from "LaPlegaria" by JanpiStar

JanpiStar invited us into their world within a small space - very intimate, warm. Their piece, "LaPlegaria," played with time as movement in deep relation to the space around them. They move seamlessly from their chair to the floor, upside down and all around. Out of vision from the camera, shadows moved against the wall, leaving only a chair in view, initiating my hunger to know, what’s behind the fourth wall? I am still so curious to know.

Lucia August’s piece, "All I Know," transports us from JanpiStar’s small, little world into an open studio filled with bright light. Her big body walking backward on a path, moving through space and possibly through time. She asks, “Why do we torment ourselves to continuously move forward?” Her pace picks up as she asks her next question, “What happens if we stop?” She fidgets with an invisible doorknob as she recalls her coming out 45 years ago. With her, we travel back in time to a moment when “Queer” was a bad word. She states clearly and firmly,  “I absolutely love her. That’s really all I know.” Those words feel important to acknowledge at any point in time, this sentiment of absolute love and it, at times, being all we really know. 

We end with randy reyes’ piece "un retablo on rupture & liberation" in a bright industrial studio in Lisbon, Portugal. Their movement offers a sense of edging towards one’s desires incrementally while exploring what is uncovered as we burrow underground. A techno track is laid against their slow, almost still body, enticing my own body to catch the beat. Suddenly I am moving. I am dancing to this beat as randy’s body moves slowly like molasses. In a moment of confrontation, randy comes face-to-face with the camera and sticks out their tongue, blowing us kisses. I just want to squeeze their face and kiss them back, like we are rolling together at a rave in some far off galaxy sweating, moving, and letting the music fill our bodies. The piece ends back in the natural world, back on earth with a soundscape of water and birds. randee’s body continuing to move to the big beats of moments passed - bouncing joyously as if we are still in the other galaxy.

While each piece was created separately, they were brought together through the theme of time. To study the construct of time as we know it, to recognize its origins within white supremacist capitalist systems, to break it apart, and reconstruct in ways that are supportive and life-affirming, rooted in our bodies and the earth - that is not just within the realm of the work and expertise of the dancer but as a Queer person. For many of us, our lives end and begin again, we fall in love on different timescales, we don’t follow the narrow constructions that time has confined us within. We are always playing with time, knowing that in the end/beginning, all will be tied back together.

Aiano Nakagawa (they/she) is a big-bodied, Queer femme dancer, writer, educator, and life-long learner based in Oakland, CA, and Portland, OR. Their work centers the body as an integral component and site of liberation. They support people on their journey towards living an embodied life with a deep connection to their innate wisdom, power, and pleasure potential. aianonakagawa.com

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of our bodies, in time

Screenshot from "bodyfabric" by Octavia Rose Hingle

 

of our bodies, in time

by audrey johnnson

Today's writing explores the 2nd Annual Queering Dance Festival, presented by Shawl-Anderson Dance Center in Berkeley, California. The 2020 iteration took place on September 19 and 20, 2020 on Twitch, with both live and pre-recorded pieces.

 

FROLIC this year takes place in the corner of my yellow room, on a Sunday evening, on a 6 x 10 inch display. My body remembers a feeling of arrival: the intention of sitting down to watch a performance, anticipation in the theater, yet missing that moment of a quieting aural gradient of pre-show murmurations hushed by dimming lights, amplifying anticipation. I remember this feeling among others from last fall performing in the first iteration of FROLIC in the tiny Waterfront Theater in Berkeley, a buzzing memory linked to a moment in my life layered in feelings of return and newness and excitement and bewilderment at the feeling of running towards intuitive wildness. 

Here in this body now I reflect on the passing of one year. How time has both compressed and widened, true of FROLIC and my life. This time, while the size of my experience of FROLIC becomes contained to the borders of my bedroom, I am also in awe of the expansive possibilities that FROLIC appearing online brings. So many more folks from beyond the Bay Area able to witness an evening of queer magic, a deep expansion from the 30 or so capacity limit of last year's space - creating a truly multi-dimensional, multi-accessible online space. It is virtual but it is real, felt, and embodied.  

The works Sunday evening are by artists: Bernard Brown; Aiano Nakagawa and Heather Stockton; Octavia Rose Hingle; Kevin Gaytan; and Chibueze Crouch. Each singular and specific, the works all consider embodiment as a queer project. I wonder: what of queerness, of the embodied experience of “being queer,” asks us to be fully and honestly IN and OF our bodies, and simultaneously proposes we be witnessed in our fullness. In watching, the line from poet Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves: finally telling the truth with every breath comes to mind to describe this sense of full embodied living. Breathing. The works in this evening’s FROLIC present an entryway into queerness that is deep to the body, a well that reaches out of the body and asks us to look back, to be witnessed, to tell the truth with every breath.

Bernard Brown/bb moves begins the evening with a live performance streaming from a blackbox studio. (What a delicious sight the studio brings me - I find myself craving to touch the marley on the screen.) Brown’s work “Anew” poses the question via a program note: “Can queerness make this world anew?” 

I witness this work as an exploration of proximity, repetition, death, the body, personal to Brown’s liveness. Brown begins a procession towards the camera singing lines from “My Country Tis of Thee,” altering the lyrics at times, and belting at the greatest of volumes from the depths of both his belly and the earth the line “land where my father died.” The volume of that expression results in a repetitive collapse: his body falls to the floor. And then rises again to sing and repeat the action. Land where my father died. Collapse. Rise again. Stand. My country tisssss of theee….Land where my father died. Collapse. Rise. Again. My country...Land where my…. Collapse. Rise. my father...Collapse. Rise. died…...Collapse. Rise. Rise.

Brown performs this falling and rising repetition suggesting to me that there is a beingness to Blackness that repeatedly rises beyond, against, and after death. This land, America, my country, stained with the blood of fathers' fathers’ fathers - a land stained by the repetition of Black death - Brown refutes this blood stained land with the repetition of his rising. Blackness refuses death by this country -- survival by flight, joy, braiding patterns, movement...We rise. We live. We are live. Poet Akilah Oliver writes: Therefore when I say “now that I’m done with being dead” I have declared an alternate self. In “Anew,” Brown presents this anew, alternate, self.

In the next section Brown, “done with being dead,” in something of a break up with the United States, performs a slightly different type of rise, of life-ness. Brown dances a groove that is joyful, form driven, colorful, alive. “My country?” No: some place anew. At the end of the work, Brown closes up on to the camera, ending by covering it with his hand. In this proximity, we were lucky witnesses of this world he creates, offerings to a future world born anew. 

Screenshot from "I Only Eat for Pleasure" by Heather Stockton and Aiano Nakagawa

The next work, “I Only Eat for Pleasure” is a stunning film by Heather Stockton and Aiano Nakagawa. Described in the program as an exploration of Queer fat liberation, friendship, joy, and pleasure, the film portrays the two artists in various manifestations of being witnessed through the titled sections: Indulgence, Joy, Gaze. Opening on to a scene of Nakagawa and Stockton enjoying a spectacular spread of food (some otherworldly version of the last supper, one I definitely want to be at) we are primed by the title to witness this section as indulgence. Within a Western society steeped in diet culture, where self restraint and control echo puritanical values when it comes to enjoying food, Nakagawa and Stockton tease our own conceptions of “Indulgence.” Can we question how we view indulgence as a liberating and righteous experience of joy and pleasure? To enjoy a meal is to love, nourish, praise the body. To do so in sensuality, queers how we conceptualize the pleasure of eating, making pleasure and indulgence something actually irresistible (and incredibly liberating).

As the film progresses to the section “Joy,” we get to see some home videos of Stockton and Nakagawa dancing a Tik Tok dance and then special, grainy footage of them each dancing (and ice skating!) as young kids. How joyful! A gift again to witness these two makers in their joy across time in quirky, extrapolated moments of dancing.

In the third and last section, Gaze, we are back in something of the present day, sitting with the artists’ simple ask of “see me.” We witness a series of solo self-recorded clips of Stockton and Nakagawa dancing, from roadside to dance studio in the simple solitude and pleasure of moving. Invited into these personal moments, the film draws itself to a quieter, contemplative tone. “I Only Eat for Pleasure” activates queerness to expand how we live (in pleasure and liberation) in our bodies. The work, in an excellently smart mirroring effect, also reflects to us how we witness our own bodies. A powerful work, Nakagawa and Stockton ask viewers to witness their bodies moving, living, being in their wholeness. They invite us to interrogate how as a Western culture we are primed to project expectations onto dancing bodies and denounce indulgences of pleasure: in the work, (and then later in the Q&A) Nakagawa and Stockton remind us that those projections are white supremacist and colonial projects, that which we must fully and actively resist. 

To be fully seen in wholeness, in joy, and in pleasure, is a beautiful and urgent antithesis to white supremacist, colonial, fatphobia in this country, and I am delighted and honored to witness Nakagawa and Stockton’s utter brilliance.

The next work, “bodyfabric,” is a film by artist Octavia Rose Hingle. The work is a stunning kaleidoscope of sound, gesture, body; a tumbling emergence of queer multiplicity depicting Octavia dancing in their bedroom. Overlaying the film, Octavia plays live improvisations on the piano, blending a choreographic visual with alive sound. Considering how their “physical impairment defines the contours of an aesthetic world,” “bodyfabric’s” visual choreography encloses in and expands out of the possibility of a body in motion in the domestic home space, and suggests an “other” space, where gravity and surfaces have different possibilities.

Propulsion against surfaces, leverage, a forward pedaling, a swinging cane extending the movement of the body’s limbs; joyful bouncing, an emerging booty twerk, the urge to bounce; to repeat; and the reaching piano imploding with emotion and depth pulling at something in my chest. This work is felt. The film's editing cinematically choreographs and layers their body as infinite motion, a multiplying self. This abstraction of image made possible by the eye of camera and editing paired with the setting of homespace, make possible an infinite rolling technique of swing, leverage, bounce, circle, joy. No longer relevant are the aesthetics of public space and the value on verticality. Here, Octavia writes their own rules of gravity; the domestic space re-writes access to surfaces on which dancing might occur, contouring an expansive movement practice. 

The continuous motion of visuals, dancing, and sound elatedly employs repetition as a re-write of spatial possibilities: aesthetic and embodied. Again, queerness is made visible by how one is of and in their body. Octavia’s movement activates a kind of unapologetic queer divinity that comes with the fullness of their self-actualizing movement. The live piano sounds as another technology of body, of life. “bodyfabric” is a full expression of motion, a queering of contour to how a body can move against and with the surrounding space, and an explosion of visual and felt movement.

Part movement poem, part lecture, part meditation on liberation, “Undocu-queer” by Kevin Gaytan takes us outside of the domestic and into public space. Gaytan beautifully pairs spoken word, dance, wardrobe, color, and “badbitchery” into a moving journey witnessing intersecting identities and the embodiment of fully living in truth. (Fun note: I met Kevin in a choreography class with Juliana May at the American Dance Festival in 2016, so I was extra delighted to witness his work here!)

Gaytan’s poetry anchors the work with context, imagery, and imagination. His self-described identities, undocu-queer, as a Gay man of color, is a moving meditation on oneself in deep relationship with land. 

Gaytan intelligently positions queerness as an intersectional identity that meets gender expression, love, ancestry, land, and living. As I watch, I wonder about how queerness almost becomes a lens that proposes another way to view one's relationship to land outside of a binary of documented and undocumented. In a nation with a nasty history of colonialism that now attempts to further displace people indigenous to this continent via racist and violent policies that I don’t need to call in by name here, the binary thinking of this or that replicates in both gender and the social concept of citizenship. Gaytan proposes we expand alongside him outside of the colonial binary, and reminds us of the truth that comes with being one's whole self. While a pre-recorded dance film, Gaytan performs towards the camera, which feels like a generous offering for us to really see, witness, him.

Professing “to be visible and unafraid,” Gaytan’s work declares his queerness as a path towards unapologetic, liberated, living. Gaytan’s work is full of clear simplicity, colorful nuance, and an offering of embodied liberation.

The last work, “you give good love” by Chibueze Crouch, is an excerpt-in-progress of Crouch’s larger work in development mouf. Appearing live on screen from her home, Crouch introduces the project, which considers the lives and work of Prince and Whitney Houston as two of her queer Black ancestors. 

The work is an ethereal experience of hyper/multi-layered embodiment through sound, visual, and intersecting time. On the screen, we see a looping recording of Prince appearing live in 1982 singing "Do Me Baby;" overlaid is the sound of Whitney Houston singing “You Give Good Love,” appearing on the Johnny Carson show also in the 80s. On top of this, Crouch appears as a small Zoom window at the bottom of the screen reading aloud a piece of her writing that reflects upon these chosen ancestors.

The layered experience of “you give good love” composes an “other” space where body, voice, and image intersect across time and space. Crouch positions Whitney Houston and Prince as intersecting beings - sharing digital space, voice overlaying image, suggesting an “other” hovering shared body. Stacked with Crouch’s voice and text, this body is further contextualized with Crouch’s present day reflections, feeling, and wonderings.

The layered location of the work, arriving from the bodies and voice of Prince, Whitney Houston, and Crouch seem to assemble in “otherwhere,” a location in time and memory that poet June Jordan speaks to about “where we come from.” This other space arrives at the scale of Black time; voice and feeling coming from multiple directions of ancestors at once, past and present coagulate into an other time and space. The work itself is in the assemblage and layering of time, as well as an invitation into what I suspect is Crouch’s sense of time and practice with chosen queer ancestors. The agency of choosing our ancestors, and the people who we call on to witness and guide us forward, is a constant, queer, conversation with time.

“you give good love” closes FROLIC with a richness that supposes the location of embodiment might expand across and beyond the present. Amplified by the digital capability of layering sound, image, and context, Crouch’s work further explores a queer relationship to embodiment that insists on multi-layered time. 

The evening of FROLIC presented multitudes of entryways for queerness as an experience of liberated embodiment. With some works live, some pre-recorded, and others a combination of both live and recorded elements, there was an expansiveness to the timescale (and access) to which we could witness dance and performance, this embodied practice of living. The artists lead me to consider how queerness asks us to be with our bodies. To be seen of and through and beyond our bodies, bodies not as a container for life but a place we might fully exalt a felt, liberated, life. See me fully in and of and enjoying my body, allowing myself to fully feel through life, is the question that being queer seems to pose. 

The world I want to keep moving towards is a queer world, and I am grateful for the many worlds created by the artists of FROLIC. Perhaps by next year time will have expanded, contracted, widened, and shapeshifted again -- and I welcome that joyfully with my fully feeling queer body now, and everyday.

Screenshot from "I Only Eat for Pleasure" by Heather Stockton and Aiano Nakagawa

Audrey Johnson is a queer Black mixed-race dance artist living in Oakland, CA. She is a maker, performer, teacher, writer, and sometimes farmer, and calls Detroit, Michigan home. www.audreyjohnson.space. 

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The Dancer is Present with Monica Bill Barnes

Screenshot from the website of Monica Bill Barnes and Company

The Dancer is Present with Monica Bill Barnes

By Garth Grimball

Modern dance is being very considerate. Before March 2020, experimentation meant confronting expectations for many dance makers. The role of the spectator, “acceptable” lengths of time, and the very definition of dancing were all questioned in a post-post-post modern sensibility. Audiences weren’t meant to be comfortable. Success meant a kind of inside-baseball thought provoking that usually only other modern dancers would take time to consider. Not so in October 2020. The audience of nine months ago is now impossible. The confronting and collapsing of expectations is the norm. Every single day.

Monica Bill Barnes & Co have created the first work of art I’ve seen that is about living in a post-coronavirus world without being - all caps - ABOUT THIS MOMENT. Keep Moving is specific, generous, and well-adapted to digital presentation. Access to the show was a sliding scale donation. Co-commissioned and presented by the American Dance Festival with support from Jody and John Arnhold/Arnhold Foundation, Keep Moving is ten chapters, eight videos and two audio, from 6 to 23 minutes a piece, meant to be consumed, as Barnes says in chapter one, as it fits into your life. How considerate. She and co-creator Robbie Saenz de Viteri even encourage you to step away from the screen for the two audio chapters. Take a walk, water your plants, a.k.a. maybe it’s a good time to get off the couch. (I felt very seen.)

Keep Moving is an adaptation of The Running Show which MBB&Co presented at Fall For Dance in NYC in 2019. The general theme of the work, perseverance, and love required of being a dancer remains. Barnes and Viteri are joined by the cast of The Running Show, dancers who were/are affiliated with Hunter College. Each chapter highlights personal narratives of the cast. Viteri conducts the interviews and acts as a gentle narrator guiding us through trials and tribulations. Some dancers contracted COVID-19, one is an essential worker, most are living in the tight quarters of NYC apartments, often packed with relatives. The narratives expand beyond pandemic induced limitations to limits of acceptance and communication. How can you express the need to dedicate your life to something few people value and makes no money? How can you reconcile that dedication with inherent prejudices that devalue you? 

Barnes, Viteri, and the creative team behind Keep Moving excel at showing and telling in ways only available to the digital medium. Several chapters feature recordings of Zoom rehearsals. We see the cast separated in their tiny frames, then our view zooms into one box and one dancer. Imagine the Ken Burns effect on a proscenium stage. The dancers don’t exit; the limits of the frame create off-stages and on-stages, simultaneously. We see repetitions of Barnes’s choreography. A propulsive, athletic phrase that eschews the modern dance face of neutrality for furrowed brows, grins, and triumphant yowls. Keep Moving juxtaposes rehearsal and performance footage from pre-pandemic to now. The dancers’ energy is constant, devoted.

I cried twice during my time with the ten chapters. Not out of sadness or happiness. I felt overcome with a sense of art-relief (there’s probably a perfect word for this in German or French). Keep Moving is a compassionate exhale. Dance will continue. Dancers will always dance. Monica Bill Barnes & Company made me feel embodied in a way I didn’t know possible via online performance. Forget “Keep Calm and Carry On.” Keep Moving and see what happens.

Screenshot from the website of Monica Bill Barnes and Company

 

Garth Grimball is a writer and dance artist based in Oakland, CA. He hosts the podcast Reference Desk and is co-director of Wax Poet(s).

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