At this time in Dance Entropy’s 2020 calendar, I and my fellow company dancers would have been very busy at work, preparing for a (thankfully rescheduled) performance with Pioneers Go East Collective at Judson Church after having just finishing an (unfortunately canceled) run of Valerie’s Young Audience Program – this year a whopping six shows: five for schools visiting Green Space, and one offsite at the Jamaica Performing Arts Center.
Jonathan Matthews performing in “Titanic” at Flushing Town Hall.
I have to confess, these gigs are my favorite.
I love having an annual vehicle (read: “The Young Audiences Program”), through which I can consistently explore and engage with the richness of Queens’ overwhelmingly diverse neighborhoods, and, in doing so, come into contact with folks I find to be the worthiest witnesses of dance – run of the mill people (or, as run of the mill as anybody in New York City could ever be).
Now, there are reports estimating that Queens might be the epicenter of New York’s battle with COVID-19, citing the confluence of City employees who live throughout the borough traveling back and forth for their unquestionably essential work. Still, things are changing everyday.
I’m realizing that perhaps the broadest possible takeaway of this pandemic is how much it has sped up the rate of change itself – a phenomenon for which many often have little patience.
There is just no (sensibly) denying it. Things are happening, and quickly.
We can no longer rest on our assumptions when, for perhaps the first time in recent history, all walks of life are being faced with what can feel like brand new parameters of reality every day.
And I find that to be absolutely thrilling.
I recall, back in mid-March, checking in with a few fellow company dancers on our assorted feelings on rehearsing as the first modification of reality was simultaneously beginning to set in. I admittedly tend to be a bit reckless, and, before understanding the full ethical scope of social distancing, was ready to dive into rehearsal without a second thought – perhaps even with a bit of newfound pride in my relatively good health.
The Young Audiences Program
Thankfully, school closures catalyzed making the ultimate call for all of us.
This, in a strange way, is a very real exercise of community, one that we can look towards as we continue learning how to be together when apart. We need these sorts of cues, from areas of life with which we are not as regularly involved, to help steer us along the right paths – particularly artists, so conditioned to keep trudging along through discomfort, often at their own expense. How convenient it is, then, that we are now living in a time in which our own expense and the expense of others have never been closer to being synonymous!
Or, rather, we simply haven’t realized it until now.
I’m proud of how not-that-long it has taken for gig workers (myself included) to, with great inventiveness, come to terms with not putting public health at further risk because rent has to be paid, and I am reveling in how quickly the curtain obscuring the inconsistent and inequitable foibles of our systems has been pulled back for all to gawk at.
“Impermanent Landscape” at Hunter’s Point Park Conservancy.
Participation in these observances will help us return to each other sooner than we otherwise would, and, perhaps, will allow us to go about said returning with a more indomitable sense of our humanity, one which we can be incubated while practicing social distancing.
I think back to a string of performances of Valerie’s Impermanent Landscape I had the pleasure to dance between 2016 and 2018. Mounting the full expression of the work at St. Mark’s Church in June 2017 was one thing, but, again, just as with the more community-oriented performances Dance Entropy puts on every year for its Young Audiences, I never tired of / was all the more activated by our taking the work into nontraditional spaces – galleries, gardens, public parks – and figuring out how to make it work in each time and space, anew.
Spoiler alert – you do not simply re-stage the piece as you may have spent two years tirelessly crafting for the theatre; you must be constantly and compassionately open to radical change, guided by a deep trust in your material’s ability to continue to speak for itself within infinitely available modified packagings.
As such, let us all use this time to similarly cultivate alternate versions and presentations of our various selves, so as to be surprised by and become all the more enamored with the material which constitutes our very beings.
Many of us choosing to take or offer classes online are already doing so, figuring out how to be a physical self in a domestic space. But there is so much more to be done. Who put up all these barriers in the first place? Let’s keep breaking them! My hope is that, whenever it is decreed, we can all return to that idea of our own “full expression,” however, resuming it rearranged, with the utmost confidence in continuing to rearrange.
Photo credits: Alex Lopez and Stephen Delas Heras