This is a story about how seemingly disparate experiences can converge in the making of art: trampolines, word play, ballroom dancing, Blue Apron, sewing, piano music, love of friends and neighbors, playing catch with our dog in Wolf Park, colleague Susan Chess, friends Betty Brown, Rick Chapman, Rebecca Gurk, Michael Kasler, and Andrea Lourie, and the production team from WOSU.
When planning 19ChoreOVIDs, doing pieces about six-foot social distancing was a no-brainer. My #6 “Six Feet, Two Hands” was one, but here I envisioned making a 12-foot diameter skirt like an outrageous hoop skirt that makes doing just about anything impossible, especially touching anyone and dancing. I was further influenced by the fact that if you remove the “I-S-T” from “DISTANCING” you have SOCIAL DANCING.
Throughout the summer I pondered how to possibly make a skirt that would maintain a full circumference. I thought about using wire or sticks, but then remembered from our trampoline days that there were rods that insert into one another that form a 12’ diameter spring tension circle to hold up nets. In fact, years ago, I had pondered using one of these circles for a costume – the idea had settled somewhere in my deep brain and had re-emerged as if it was a new idea.
For strange global pandemic reasons, it took months to receive the rods, so the final stages of production lasted through January. For the skirt itself, I pulled out silver thermal packaging I had saved “for some reason” from Blue Apron days. ("Silver linings" has come up a lot during the pandemic and this costume nods to that much to my unintended surprise). After flattening out the thermal pouches, laying them on the driveway around the rods' circle and attaching them with duct tape, I was left with the conundrum of how to attach it all to my body. A very long piece of rope was woven through holes at waist height (because to store the darn thing, everything had to open up flat), and then belts firmly attached over that. Knowing that I was doing a riff on ballroom dancing, I asked my wonderful colleague Susan Chess to improvise and record an over-the-top waltz, so I had in hand a lovely piece of original music.
Initially I pictured having a single dance partner, but I thought it more poignant to dance with a number of people and repeatedly be unable to connect. A generous group of friends came to Wolf Park to help on a windy January morning. My husband Ric was also instrumental in wrestling with the skirt, calming my frustrations with the substantial wind and luckily, I do get to dance with him in real life.
Finally, when WOSU called me interested in doing an episode of their “Broad & High” series, we decided this ChoreOVID would be the best one to document as it was going to all be done outdoors. In May 2021 they will air the episode about this and the whole series. Lucky for us, it is their video we are using here with their permission, as it was better quality and solved various issues in our video. Ric mastered some inspired effects that underscore notions of nostalgia along with the strange futuristic DIY of the weird social distancing (social dancing) skirt.
Artists collect things, memories, sensations, movements - stashing them away "just in case".... because something resonates, something tweaks at the back of the brain, something gives pleasure.... and if alert, brave, ruthless, and thoughtful, surprising threads come together with seeming serendipity, but in fact are deeply rooted in the whole of one's being.
The video: https://vimeo.com/505495738
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