I'm a student currently in pursuit of her B.F.A. in dance, and dance has been really weird for me during quarantine. Obviously, my classes were shifted to online formats back in March but they have since ended. I have spent a lot of this time grappling with how I feel about dance and reflecting on my approach to class.
I haven't really been inspired to get up and groove everyday. At first, I thought this would be a great time to create some dance concept videos around my house, and I had a few ideas I wanted to play with. However, I never even started working on these because I just did not feel like it. A depressive episode causing me to stay in bed? Maybe. Instead of taking one of the hundreds, if not thousands, of online dance classes being offered, I found myself painting, cooking, writing, and creating a whole ass blog... So obviously my creativity was doing just fine. And it still is. So what's going on here?
The classes I am taking are mostly ballet barre warm ups taught on Instagram live or Zoom. I think I have gravitated towards ballet because that's what I grew up doing. The steps are ingrained in my muscle memory and I know what to work on without having to think too hard. Despite my 17 years of ballet training, I still have to work extremely hard to execute the movement to my standards. Since college I have started to look at my prior ballet training more critically. Ballet can be quite oppressive at times, restricting what bodies are allowed to perform it and having extreme expectations of those bodies. That causes me a lot of mental conflict with how I feel about ballet, but I cannot help but feel connected to ballet. The combinations feel beautiful, challenging, and nostalgic for me. Maybe I am longing for something familiar in this complicated time. It is also a lot easier to do a ballet barre in my kitchen than to try to do some big expansive jazz class or something where I would try to take up a lot of space.
I have plenty of desire to move, so that's definitely not why I'm not choreographing. I have been practicing yoga and working out regularly since things shut down because it feels good. I have been sweating in my basement doing online workouts with friends, but I can't bring myself to sweat it out on a dance zoom call. I just really don't want to. And I don't want to make dances either really... But if I spend a day without doing some sort of physical activity I feel gross.
The world feels too big for me right now. The problems we are facing feel magnitudes larger than any issue a little dance video in my room could possibly confront. That's also where I stand with this blog too, it just doesn't feel like I can write about anything else except quarantine and coronavirus. I have about 10 blog post ideas just saved into my drafts about awesome, important topics that I simply cannot write right now. They feel irrelevant. I have thought about choreographing something related to the current situation, but this event does not evoke any inspiration to dance for me. Maybe it is because I am literally staying in one place, on lockdown physically. Maybe that's why I stick to ballet, because everything else is a bit too vibrant for the situation.
Also, the posts I see and my own ideas about how the dance world will continue after this pandemic are absolutely terrifying. If we continue social distancing, how we watch performances is going to change completely, and even how we relate to each other in the dance studio. I don't think we are doomed as a dance industry, but I do think things are going to change drastically and it may be some time before the world catches on. Teachers are going to have to adapt to this cultural shift, and dance teachers are already some of the most stubborn about those sorts of things. If you look at a ballet class from the 1800s versus now, they're pretty much the same steps only with increased range of motion. There's an ongoing discussion about how dance teachers need to remember to value the mental and physical health of their students, because in their generation they were mostly seen as bodies. The changing culture does excite me in a way. This predicament causes a need for innovation in the dance community, and that inspires me to innovate. I think limitations often cause beautiful creative solutions, and I am excited to experiment with that.
But for now, I have really taken this time to self-care and do what I want to do, which does not include a lot of dancing or choreographing. And that's okay with me. I am having fun exploring these other creative outlets like my blog, and I'm sure they will inform me as a choreographer when the time comes.
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