Pas De Bourree and a Face Mask: Dancing During a Pandemic
Our January meeting about our upcoming show was so full of optimism. 2020’s theme: The World We Live In. There were so many subjects to be explored by our choreographers. Fires, Floods, Political Unrest, Consumerism, Racism etc. We don’t, as a company, shy away from the controversial. ECHO’s third summer was ready to be spectacular. We’d already had two fantastic shows with two diverse groups of dancers. We knew we had some people coming back and that they were bringing new faces with them. We knew we had dancers that felt so confident from last year that they were submitting choreography this year. We were feeling successful that this experiment that was ECHO was about to have one of the most exciting summers yet. It felt like success, and 2020 had so much potential.
Then March came. And with it came Covid 19. A flurry of meetings over Zoom between our three directors (Kate, Travers, and Candice) ensued. The information seemed to change daily. Could we even do this? How do we do this safely? How do we pivot our operational plans, only 2 years tested, to meet this challenge?
Our auditions were moved online. We allowed our dancers to do video submissions. We set up Zoom choreography auditions so we could get a real sense of the subject being explored and feelings behind the works. We polled our potential company: will you dance if it’s all virtual? Will you dance if it’s in person but goes straight to DVD? Will you dance if it’s a live show? We wanted to get a sense of what our dancers NEEDED, because ECHO is a FAMILY, not just a dance company. The majority of our people wanted to be together, and once that decision was made we pivoted. Our directors studied the guidelines, and we morphed how we operated every time those guidelines changed. We were no longer just focusing on producing a show, but now also focused on the safety and wellbeing of our people. Everyone needed to wear a face mask. We could only have 12 people in a room at a time. We could only have two rooms. Rehearsals have had to be stretched longer to accommodate. Temp checks and hand sanitizer and hepa filters and Lysol. And we were constantly watching the numbers. There were some hiccups but we got there.
There was a sense of urgency and attention to everything we did, because we knew we couldn’t operate like we usually did. There was no group warm up to build comradery. There was no capability to run the dances that have been learned every week, because we couldn’t have all 25 of us in a room. There was no hugging, no high fives, no group circles to pass a squeeze. From the outside it might even have looked a bit clinical. However, it was anything but clinical. Out of all of this adversity something beautiful bloomed.
The dances this year have a poignancy and a quiet desperation, because everyone in the room is living through a trying time. There are pieces full of pain and adversity. There are pieces about rising up, about standing by each other in the worst of times, about life and death. Our dancers rose to the challenge with a quiet grace. Our directors fought fiercely to give this company an outlet for all these emotions, and a celebration of all this dedicated work. This is the stuff of life, and we are living it.
We went from being able to have a live show indoors with an audience, to being able to have a show indoors with half an audience, to being able to have a show outdoors with an audience, to now having been able to record our pieces and possibly show them at a drive in (still working on that! Stay tuned!) With every subsequent change, we never gave up fighting to bring this show to life. That is the ultimate expression of the human spirit when faced with adversity. Rising to the challenge. Voraciously taking in information, and immediately accepting change, to ensure in the end there is something left to fight for.
Throughout history, dance has been an outlet for expressing the human experience. Watch as ECHO brings you the stories from “The World We Live In” To get information on when and how to view this year’s performance please stay tuned to www.echodance.wixsite.com/dance and follow us on Facebook and Instagram.