Separation Anxiety: Recorded Dances from a Pandemic Year
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Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, well over a year has passed since most dance fans have enjoyed live ballet or modern dance, and many companies anxiously plan to flaunt the full vitality of flesh-and-blood dancing once again this fall before flesh-and-blood witnesses. Companies, such as the New York City Ballet, performed this summer with limited task forces for limited, socially distanced audiences. For the most part, however, dance lovers have continued to make do with online and streaming videos, some of them recordings of archival performances, others onstage presentations of new and repertory works captured in empty theaters, and still others experiments in designing dances expressly for the medium, whether recorded on smartphones, conducted by terpsichorean Zoom conference, or conceived as more ambitious films.
Initially, as in one work I discussed last year by the L. A. Dance Project and others by members of the New York City and San Francisco Ballets, dancers devised new works, recorded themselves individually on their smartphones, and worked with editors to splice the results together into short dances. Soon choreographers realized that Zoom, the online meeting app, enabled them to teach new ballets to groups of dancers. The painstaking and frustrating process of Zoom choreography yielded necessarily brief works, of a few minutes. The modern dance choreographer Stephen Petronio released #GimmeShelter in June 2020, days after police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis. It runs four-and-a-half minutes, the length of the Rolling Stones song that became a pandemic anthem while we sheltered in place and mourned those dead of COVID-19. The song’s warnings of violence—“War, children [and later “Rape, murder”], it’s just a shot away”—acquired new urgency as the administration in Washington determined to battle some of its citizens, and its final fadeout, “Love, sister, it’s just a kiss away,” evoked the solidarity and kinship motivating protestors.
The video opens with Petronio talking his company through part of the dance: “Gather up [lifts his arms up above his shoulders], cut across [hands sweep across his chest], leg [kicks forward], leg [kicks backward, while extending an arm forward].” The intro’s ticking guitar begins, and two dancers, Ryan Pliss and Mac Twining, ready themselves at home. A shot of a flowering bush, a body of water, then successive shots of Trump, computer animations of the COVID-19 virus, and a hospital ship heading for New York, initiate a Life Under Covid montage for the city and the company: fire escapes, hands lathering up, a man in the shower, Pliss applying glittery eye makeup, Larissa Asebedo and Petronio preparing, the COVID-19 animation, Anthony Fauci speaking. Petronio’s Zoom palette appears, showing all the dancers in the top right corner of each space, backs to the camera. As the Stones’ melody kicks in, they turn, one by one, to face us.
Petronio’s choreography is highly formalist, with arms moving in precise geometry and quick cuts from dancer to dancer. The work’s political [End Page 468] attitude emerges not from the steps but from the images intercut with the performers, and via the dancers’ social segregation. The dancers turn and thrust their hips; Twining slowly turns and kicks; Asebedo plays her hands about her upper body. When the spinning virus reappears, we imagine Petronio has choreographed its solo as well.
Petronio edits so gestures ripple like waves through his company. After Ernesto Breton gives dynamic flourishes to his arm and leg thrusts, Acebedo inherits his torque: a slow punch forward spins her body around, her long dark hair waving. Jaqlin Medlock’s hair continues the wave while she executes a slow turn, her extended leg adopted immediately by Breton. When Pliss hops in the air, his working leg extended, Twining lands in the same pose. Nicholas Sciscione, in a short blue robe, kicks toward the camera, and Breton follows the gesture through. Medlock, Twining, Tess Montoya, Breton, Sciscione, and Asebedo, each in turn, vogue cross-legged toward us, arms articulate in the air. Each dancer then approaches the camera, showing only eyes or lips, ready for a kiss.
Petronio returns, doing...
