Dancing in Quarantine: Gaga with James Graham
On Tuesday I joined James Graham’s online Gaga class. You can find out all about Gaga, Ohad Naharin’s “movement language” on James’ website.
Dozens of people jumped onto Zoom and into Gaga. From his light-filled apartment in San Francisco, James led us through a series of movement experiences that emphasized things like feeling the air on your skin, energizing the whole body, and noticing the sensation of your skin gliding around inside the elastic waistband of your underwear. Never before had I thought about the intimate relationship between my skin and my clothes.
We moved slowly, we moved quickly, we connected to space, sideways, forward and back, up and down, high diagonals, low diagonals. If we had windows, we were invited to look out into the distance. We stretched our faces into ghastly smiles, we softened our faces and felt the beginning of a genuine smile at the corners of our mouths and eyes. James shared his “Gaga Good Feels” Spotify playlist — which includes “Grace” by Bob Moses and “World to Come” by David Lang and Maya Beiser, among other trance-inducing tracks — and invited us to play it in our own homes. I did so and felt deeply supported by his musical choices.
I kept my video camera off and just watched James occasionally as I took in his instructions. I broke a sweat. I cried a little. At the end of the class, I switched from speaker view to grid view and saw a Faberge Organics Shampoo commercial of Gaga people, waving, floating, shifting, bending, swirling. It was magical.
A lot of movement forms are well-suited to online platforms, especially if you have familiarity with them, double especially if they are rigorously codified — ballet, Cunningham technique, studio hip hop, yoga. But I’m going to go out on all six of my limbs to say that Gaga, the least codified of all, may just be the ideal form for dancing in quarantine. Under the guidance of our generous, cheerful, beautifully voiced, talented leader, we moved together freely, encountering ourselves in community with others. James’ Gaga online felt performative of our time, a time to get closer to ourselves while reaching out and across from a distance.
Va-va-voom, Gaga Zoom!
