Dance in the Time of the Coronavirus

Ballet, 3D Dance, Shadows, Dance, Dark

ballet-1893567__340.jpg (604×340) (pixabay.com)

I haven’t posted for a while, because it’s hard to see at this stage where in the dance world we’re all going. It’s a strange time. Probably everyone feels the same — worn out, worried, sad, and not sure how to deal with it.

One thing we’ve learnt is how dependent we are on art and culture. People try to work from home, children try to deal with online schoolwork, but what keeps everyone sane (more or less) is what you can see on TV, the things you can read, the music, the design, the drama – in other words, the arts. It’s hard to imagine how we would get through the isolation of lockdown without the entertainment on which we constantly rely.

“O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we tell the dancer from the dance?” — William Butler Yeats, (Among School Children)

There’s a message here for all of us. Artists and art people are not just messing about having fun instead of working, we are actually helping to keep alive the most important human traits, the love of beauty and art as an instrument of social cohesion, support, communication, community and survival. In just a few short months we’ve had to get used to doing without so much of normal life – we can’t hang out together, can’t go out to a café, go for a meal, go to each other’s houses, go for a drink, go to a ballet, a concert, an opera. That’s a long list of no-go areas. But we still have art, and that’s our shining light.

“Good art is a form of prayer. It’s a way to say what is not sayable.” — Frederick Busch

This pandemic is bigger than we are. Unless it’s brought under control, it could finish us. We’ve got to keep it in check. We’ve absolutely got to accept all these restrictions, irksome as they are. Masks, ventilation, distance and basic hygiene commonsense (e.g. handwashing) are among the few ways we can control this killer disease.

“The only way to do it is to do it”. — Merce Cunningham

As I write this, many places are experiencing Lockdown 2. The weather’s changing, people are spending time indoors, close to each other, and everyone’s worried about making a living. Shops close, people get laid off or their pay is reduced. The festive season is coming, but there’s not much fun about. There’s anger, though, and rebellion – people refusing to accept the rules, refusing to wear masks or keep their distance, all of which is very dangerous.

Where we live, a lot of ballet schools were paying lip-service to the rules, getting their students to wear face-coverings on the way into and out of the studio, taking them off for class. This is totally wrong. Any intelligent assessment of masks confirms that they block aerosol-born virus particles in the air we all breathe, those very particles that carry and transmit the disease. Until vaccines are widely available, masks are vital to our survival. Whether you or I find them uncomfortable or inconvenient is really not the point. I wear mine and you wear yours to keep each other safe. The future of humanity may well depend on that simple commitment. Please, do it and stick with it. This really matters. Life is infinitely precious; don’t throw it away.