Dear readers, this month we have two reflections on the daily lives of dancers in our new normal. But first I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge some losses in our community. Tonight we learned of the death of Nancy Stark Smith, one of the founding mothers of contact improvisation and beloved teacher and artist. She inspired many events, including this one that took place here in Salt Lake just less than two years ago.

Our city’s own Laja Field wrote on instagram, she was the “epitome of a strong, bold, passionate woman. I’ll never forget the first time I met her at Bates Dance Festival in 2011. Basking in her presence was enough, but goin g to her contact jams and actually being able to move with her was a dream. She was a serene force, deeply rooted, nimble, extraordinary.”

On the NYTimes website, I also learned about the death of an artist I wasn’t aware of, Don Campbell, inventor of the Campbellock, better known as “locking”. As NYTimes staffer Daniel Slotnick writes, “Campbell invented locking, a style that eventually permeated hip-hop dance, because he had a hard time doing the robot.”

“He was practicing the robot with friends in his college cafeteria in 1970 when he forgot the next step. He locked his joints and froze for an instant, dramatically accentuating the dance and captivating his spectators.”

Reading about these deaths reminded me that I have been looking for a way to acknowledge another recent passing closer to home. Stefanie Slade, dancer and longtime production manager at the Rose Wagner, died earlier this year in February. I didn’t have the privilege of knowing her well, but I always enjoyed her energy and wit when we interacted at the Rose. Her obituary can be found here. I noticed today that Melanie Maar, a choreographer in New York, posted this radio documentary about Stefanie Slade. It’s worth listening to.

Below are reflections on life in the last few weeks by Hannah Fischer and Kendall Fischer. I don’t believe they are related. In fact, I don’t think they know each other, but their pieces on the strangeness of recent times exist nicely side by side.

—Samuel Hanson, editor

Insert profound title here: the view of one grad student…

In early March 2020, when I read that Duke, Harvard, UCLA, and the University of Notre Dame had moved all of their classes online, I knew it was just a matter of time until I received the same news from the University of Utah. I made it back to Salt Lake City from a trip in time to visit Weller Book Works before all non-essential businesses closed. I had been off-campus at an artist residency for three weeks in Florida, one of the first states to declare a state-wide emergency. Within five days of returning home, the University and downtown had become ghost towns.

Dance students and faculty have been rolling with the punches since the announcement to cancel the rest of the semester. Despite fear and uncertainty looming in the background, I've been continually inspired by the dance community's commitment to connection. There are so many options to move 'together' virtually, I cannot keep up.

In the last few weeks, I've seen a new set of values running parallel to the 'let's keep dancing' discourse. The 'you don't have to do all this' conversation around toxic positivity and permission to rest is an essential counterpart to the onslaught of screen time. Alexandra Beller's essay ISOLATION, OBSTACLES, TOXIC POSITIVITY, AND MAKING ART IN A CRISIS came at a crucial moment in my personal process two weeks ago. "If you are feeling optimistic and positive, enjoy yourself. If you are feeling rage, apathy, grief, frustration, and resentment, live in them fully. There are no good or bad feelings. There is no hierarchy or goal for how we should feel (not ever, and especially not now)".

As our hyper-productive world tries to smash itself into our homes and our most protected spaces, I ask myself how much of that outcome-driven perspective is useful for me at this time. Like anything else, it's not only wrong, and it's not only right. Sometimes I need to sit down at this computer and crank some shit out. Sometimes I need to let the university to-do list wait. It is an ongoing navigation.

Working from home 100% of the time can blur our boundaries of attention and productivity in a way that keeps us in fight or flight mode all the time. Add financial instability, career unknowns, and weeks of earthquakes to the equation; Salt Lake City is ripe for anxiety.

My students have told me repeatedly that they feel they are working 10+ hours a day every day, still never denting their to-do list. Even with faculty pairing down their course requirements and extending deadlines, the mountain of work feels insurmountable. I, too, have felt overwhelmed by a sense of endless, impossible tasks. And then I often immediately feel bad for feeling that way because I am fortunate in so many ways; I have a place to shelter in, a partner to shelter with, income for another four weeks. However, this cocktail of misplaced guilt, overwhelm, and fear does not help anyone. It freezes the nervous system, holding me in place with a heightened heart rate, immobilized.

Perhaps the new baseline of immobilization explains why online movement classes have been well attended for over a month now. Moving the body is one way to move through fear, moving the juicy guts to rearrange ourselves. In movement, we can feel more of ourselves than the primary passion drives of frenetic doing, trepidation, stagnation. Emilie Conrad writes in Life on Land, "The encompassing fluid movement of love is where fear and vigilance can soften" (27). I certainly need fear and vigilance to soften, I can feel their presence in my thoracic spine. In movement, we can recover ourselves and recuperate from the contained state of staying home with our screens. Dance class, however, is only one way to recuperate.

In the Laban/Bartenieff Movement System (LBMS), we talk about rhythms of exertion and recuperation, often framed by the Effort category of the system. Rhythms of exertion and recuperation allow us to change approaches, both from a strictly movement analysis perspective, and also by allowing different parts of ourselves to make choices. For example, writing this post requires a different part of my creative and analytical mind than grading papers, and therefore alters my attention. Shifting attention allows me to adapt, to stay malleable and porous, which are attributes I desperately need right now.

In the time of COVID-19, exertion and recuperation have changed forms dramatically. What might have been exertion before, a dance class, might now be a recuperation from sitting in Zoom calls. How do YOU feel after four hours of Zoom calls? I find myself increasingly attracted to short, discreet tasks like making lunch or watering my plants as a way of recuperating from managing the classes I facilitate and the ones I attend. Walking uphill to 11th Avenue has become a great recuperation, letting my heel bones swing forward, fully advancing my torso as I push and rise up the hill. As I walk, I can allow my eyes to scan the streets and sky, taking many things in without searching or comprehending. An experience of expansive focus is significant after hours and hours of direct attention on a screen, a book, or even one of my little recuperations in my home.

In How to do Nothing, Jenny Odell writes about the attention economy, making a case for doing 'nothing.' In it, she does not propose that we all abandon our responsibilities and sit around unthinkingly. Instead, she writes about a sort of recuperation that I have found personally and politically relevant, even before COVID-19. Now, it is much more so. ”…what I'm suggesting is that we take a protective stance toward ourselves, each other, and whatever is left of what makes us human - including the alliances that sustain and surprise us. I'm suggesting that we protect our spaces and our time for non-instrumental, noncommercial activity and thought, for maintenance, for care, for conviviality. And I'm suggesting that we fiercely protect our human animality against all technologies that actively ignore and disdain the body, the bodies of other beings, and the body of the landscape that we inhabit".

How then, do we protect our spaces and time while remaining contributors to our communities? I don't have a 5 step plan, but I have a few things that have been working for me:

My 'routine' could barely be called a routine. I'm not giving myself more than 1-2 structural responsibilities (calls/classes) each day. I need to be able to change my attention and reset my course at any moment. Some days this allows me to move more quickly through my tasks, and some days it does not. However, it does allow me to stay 'in-the-zone' when I become obsessed and hyper-focused.
After I complete big energetic academic tasks, I make something. Or I lay down for a long time. It is harder to acknowledge the significant accomplishments while we are sheltering in place, so it has been essential to actively choose how to recuperate or celebrate.
Hard copy books. If you live in Salt Lake City, you can still get books from Weller Book Works. If not, you might be able to find a local bookstore that still does curbside pick up.
Avoiding all synchronous classes. I'm not expecting my students to attend synchronous Zoom meetings, and if I offer them as an option, I keep them short. I have attended a few synchronous classes by Barbara Mahler for stretch and placement, but otherwise, I am responsible for my own practice.
Not taking myself, or my academic work, too seriously. Okay, full disclosure, I've been working on this one for a while. As my dad would say, 'lighten up!'

My first sourdough starter sort of died, and I've decided it's okay to start over.

I leave you with a final quote from Jenny Odell and a bunch of links below. "When the pattern of your attention has changed, you render your reality differently. You begin to move and act in a different kind of world."

Though we are staying home ('we are all indoor cats now, as my partner would say'), we are also still three-dimensional beings MOVING through our worlds. Nothing can replace a room full of dancers radiating energy, and nothing can prevent you from taking a moment to sense into your sense of width, length, and depth. Even as you sit and read this post, you have both a profound quiet and a current of movement inside your skin.

Hannah Fischer is a dance maker from the Midwest currently based in Salt Lake City, UT. She is a Certified Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analyst and a 2020-21 Graduate Research Fellow at the University of Utah.

Kendall Fischer on replanning Myriad’s season…

Late one night last fall, I sat eating sweet potato fries at a favorite pub with Myriad’s assistant director, Fiona Nelson, each of us in full glow-in the-dark skeleton makeup. After performing a spooky duet at a horror-themed event, we were making time to do a retrospective about Myriad’s recent project, PENUMBRA, which we had shared with audiences during the first weekend of October 2019. October is busy for Halloween freelance dance gigs, and we agreed that we’d never again schedule a contemporary show in that month.

Our discussion of our recent project led us into brainstorming for our next project, thinking of all the lessons we learned and best practices we established that we could apply to this future work, in addition to new things we wanted to try. Over the next few months Fiona and I met multiple times with Sierra Stauffer, Myriad’s creative coordinator, to continue to shape our vision and outline the means to accomplish this vision for our next project.

We wanted to work with multiple choreographers within this show, and to invite them to watch and give input on auditions, better connecting them with the overall project process from the beginning. We brainstormed about the artistic theme and how to guide our choreographers to create a cohesive and impactful show out of separate pieces. For a refreshing artistic effect, we decided to make most pieces in this upcoming show trios, bookending the trio performances with larger group pieces at the beginning and end.

The idea of a show inspired by Dante’s seven deadly sins came from my sister, Jordan. It’s a concept that’s been around a long time and is maybe even overplayed, but what made it exciting for us was the idea of using it as a framework for exploring human judgement. We named the project NOTION, in reference to an impression that one person has about another.

I explained to the choreographers that we wanted each piece to be based on one of the distinct seven deadly sins, and that we wanted them to dive deep to explore multiple sides or even a spectrum of a ‘sin’ and its context – and to leave some of it questionable or controversial. I asked them to start with questions like: Why is this a sin? When would it not be a bad thing? When does a good thing become perverted or taken too far? Are there exceptions? Who is at fault?

We had decided on all live music, and encouraged the musicians and choreographers to work together to develop a unified piece of art. Some of the music was adapted from existing compositions, and some of it is composed specifically for this project.

We held a fundraiser gala partway through our rehearsal process. At this event, we welcomed guests to mingle over finger foods, and we showed works-in-progress and encouraged the audience members to share their impressions and ask the choreographers questions about the pieces. I took notes for each choreographer about the audience responses regarding their creation.

The gala, which we had been inspired to do by the example of Karin Fenn Dance, has become one of my favorite parts of Myriad’s project process. I love that it helps us connect with our audience more deeply, giving choreographers different perspectives at a time when they still have rehearsal hours available to use for making changes based on these different perspectives.

In addition to providing the audience feedback from the gala, I continued checking in with the choreographers, trying to guide each piece to be distinct from each other piece, to feel compatible within the context of the overall show, and to offer a good balance of clarity versus interpretability.

And then COVID-19 happened, and now the project is postponed for a good while.

I’m very hopeful that the investments that Myriad NOTION artists, including choreographers, dancers, musicians, costume designer, and company leadership, have made into this project so far can be a strong foundation to build upon when we pick up NOTION again later this year.

I believe that there is so much value in creating art at any time, and especially during periods of uncertainty like this. So with NOTION being on a long pause, I encouraged each of the artists involved to continue creating in the meantime, and to share their creations with others. I’m loving seeing how so many artists in our community are continuing to create within these unexpected circumstances.

I feel that this pause in our project will help deepen our appreciation for opportunities to create art together in the future. And I look forward to sharing Myriad’s art in live performances later on.

Kendall Fischer is the artistic director of Myriad Dance Company, and has enjoyed performing opportunities with Voodoo Productions, SBDance, Municipal Ballet Co., and La Rouge Entertainment, among others. Her choreography has been performed by Myriad, Municipal Ballet, and at Creator's Grid, and her dance film project Breathing Sky received the 2017 Alfred Lambourne Movement prize.