Well, it has been over a year since I last posted here again – life got too hectic once we got into performance season… then shortly after, all you-know-what broke loose as we were sent home to shelter-in-place from the COVID pandemic in March. Now that it’s been nearly a year of distance learning, I am starting to dig out from under a couple of hectic and stressful semesters, and would like to catch up – so here goes…
When I left off, my wonderful Dance Production class was working on their dance about “othering.” Suffice it to say that we had a lot of zig-zags on the road to finishing that one (many of them around finding just the right music for each section that we could all get along with), but it did get finished beautifully. The class ended up performing it for the CDEA dance festival in February, and was two days away from performing it again for our district dance festival in March when the district cancelled all performances due to the pandemic… and so it started.
The rest of spring semester was definitely a scramble. I still managed to teach dance forms for my Dance 1 and Dance 2 classes – the saving grace being that what we had yet to work on was mostly Hawai’ian hula and Tahitian ‘ori, both of which are uniquely suited to performing in small spaces (steps in Hawai’ian and Tahitian are supposed to be very small, since the whole point of taking steps is to shift weight to initiate hip movement, not to do any significant traveling). Final choreography projects were all done as solos, as we didn’t have time to figure out how to make group choreography projects work – the Dance 1 narrative final was replaced with working to poetry; and for Dance 2 we pivoted to working with objects, so that they could use something in their households as the impetus for their dances.
Dance Production had been set to perform not only their “othering” piece, but also a Hawai’ian hula we had been working on to premiere at the multicultural rally that usually happens at the end of March; then they were to have started work on their own choreography projects, already fully planned and cast. Plans went out the window as we turned to creating solo and duet projects that could be created and recorded at home – the instructions were to create a site-specific dance for recording on video, focusing on a meaningful topic. Nearly all of the dancers came through with solos (and one duet) for a virtual concert (a simple video playlist) – after all the confusion of the emergency shelter-in-place, it was lovely and moving to see their individual dances, created in their own homes and backyards...
For the full-class repertory, we continued rehearsing the hula until it was perfected enough to record with a performance on Zoom – the final performance was far from perfect, of course, since no one is ever “in sync” on Zoom due to differing wi-fi speeds, but it was still a lovely performance. We also added something that I had heard about from other dance teachers, a class “chain dance” or “exquisite corps” by analogy with the Surrealist “exquisite corpse” parlor game in which each artist adds to a drawing or poem without seeing what came before. The way the dance version works is that we established a random order, then each dancer would create a very short (8 - 10 seconds) solo, and send the recording to the next dancer on the list; the next dancer would then start their solo from the same movement as their predecessor’s ending. It took a lot of nagging to get all of the dancers to finish their segments in time – with students used to keeping track of due dates and finishing assignments just in time, it’s hard to get across the message that if everyone took five days to finish their part and send it to the next dancer, it would take months to get the entire dance done! – but they finally did finish, and it made a beautiful opening for the virtual concert, as it briefly introduced each dancer in the class in turn by name before they showed their individual projects.
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