Aerial Dancing in a Pandemic

68 days.

68 days since we locked the doors of our beautiful cultural arts studio Arcadia due to a COVID-19 outbreak here in Washington State, where we will forever bear the crown of the first state in the US to have multiple outbreaks and cases of coronavirus.

Mid-March seems so far away now. I remember those early days of the viral outbreak and reminisce. I remember our diligent doorknob and light switch sanitizing, and our social distancing in aerial classes, before we had to close our doors for who knows how long under an order by our governor. March events were optimistically moved to April and May. The worldwide number of cases was still below 1 million.  Most of us had no idea what the near future would hold. Every single one of us has been impacted in our own profound way. Very few of us will emerge from this time unchanged.

The primary artistic discipline I have practiced, taught, and performed for the past nearly 20 years is aerial dance. This art form incorporates aspects of improvisation, ground-based dance, and aerial acrobatics, and provides a perfect medium for storytelling and artistic expression. Aerial dance necessitates the use of an aerial apparatus such as a fabric, a trapeze, a hoop, or a harness in order to facilitate connection between earth and sky. Our apparatus becomes our dance partner.

But aerial dance also often necessitates creating and building movement with other dancers and partnering and/or working in groups is a very common exploration in this work, as it is in most dance forms. The images in the header of this article demonstrate some of the moments of powerful connection, narrative, and tenderness expressed in my company The Cabiri‘s work in the past few years. Today, the notion of entering into someone else’s physical bubble, sharing breath and sweat with them over many days and hours of rehearsal and creation and performance feels so forbidden. COVID-19 has created distance on more levels than I can possibly fathom.

So now, in the age of COVID-19, what does aerial dance look like? Throughout most of the country (and world), indoor fitness and dance studios have been closed for weeks. Some may never reopen after this crisis subsides, due to lost revenues during the pandemic. For those of us who have our own studios, we have been able to continue our aerial dance practice a little bit while maintaining our mandated closure.  But the way we used to practice, teach, and create is in the past for the foreseeable future.

As some studios are allowed to reopen, a huge litany of new considerations, liabilities, and requirements will follow. Sanitization, physical distancing, symptom monitoring among staff and students are among the new factors we will have to consider. I recently tried running some basic aerial dance sequences in a double layer cotton mask and, while it did not impede my vision or move around during all of my spinning and inversions, it did create a restriction on my respiration reminiscent of high altitude training. I offer words of caution to anyone who intends to incorporate mask-wearing into their aerial practice or teaching – you will not be able to do everything you used to do. Be prepared to modify your practice, take more breaks, and not have the stamina you previously enjoyed.

But what of the connection we used to share with our students, our fellow dancers, and perhaps most importantly our audiences? This will suffer too in the coming weeks, months, and potentially years. The days of sitting in an enclosed space with dozens or hundreds of other people are over for the foreseeable future. The beautiful intimacy and connection we once knew as artists sharing physical space with each other as part of the co-creation process will not exist for many days to come. And so what stories will we tell? What dances will we make? How will we explore and create connection while maintaining physical distance? The grief I carry at the loss of my primary medium for making sense of life and the world has impacted me profoundly.

And so I wonder if perhaps it is time to explore isolation, distance, and those dark spaces where we exist alone. And although the darkness can be frightening because so little is revealed and so much is unknown there, it is also the home of the Mysteries and is the realm of dream, imagination, and the subconscious. We emerge from and return to darkness in the course of our lifetimes. Personally, I look forward to an opportunity to explore those spaces more intentionally this year to see what emerges.

 

Header photos by Warren Woo, Marcia Davis and WittyPixel Photography.