I get tons of emails from various ballet companies and projects. This morning I woke up to one from the Washington Ballet, which pointed me to the “WPA” series, which stands for “Works and Process at the Guggenheim” a series of virtual pandemic-era artistic collaborations. This series led me to “Storm”:
I don’t know what moved me quite so much about this video. The dramatic black and white color palette; the aching and luxurious song; Sara’s leaping-then-melting choreo. Or maybe it was that stirring key change partway through…or maybe it’s the fact that I’m sitting alone in my study, in an otherwise absolute silence, in a city whose character has been unalterably changed by the pandemic. When I moved into Dupont Circle, I lived across the street from a dozen restaurants and a grocery store, and around the corner from a busy bar. Most weekday mornings, I had to put in earplugs to sleep through the 6 AM din of delivery and dump trucks. Strolling through my neighborhood last Sunday night, I faced empty streets and a post-apocalyptic atmosphere. The only people out were people who didn’t have a lot of options. There are a lot of people in that position.
It’s small in the midst of so many losses, but I miss watching live dance. I noticed for the first time the narrowness of the Youtube window, and the many aspects of human connection that it elides. I just wrote a book about online communities. I’ve spent so much of this pandemic musing on how the world has expanded. But sitting with the awareness that I should be watching Sara on a stage and not on my computer, I felt overwhelmed by wanting something I couldn’t have. I felt the actual struggle of art to beat back darkness, but I also felt its inability to do so.
There are other videos in this series that handle the pandemic differently, although they all handle it. ‘Intermission’ evokes Singing in the Rain, with a somber overlay.
Meanwhile, 5-10-15 hours is, according to the artists, “a winking fantasy of life at home for two professional swing dancers.”
Even the video pieces that don’t comment explicitly on the pandemic feature it as an artistic subtext. While “Storm” is filmed against the implied bars of a cage, many pandemic-era choreographies I’ve seen take place in the outdoors. Sure, it’s the one place where we can go. But it’s also a spiritual and visual counterpoint to an otherwise inescapable claustrophobia.