“Keeping a Safe DisDance” Performance: Envisioning and Embodying What Comes Next
By Hilary Dartt
Earlier this year, as the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting quarantine had so many people feeling isolated and alone, a group of local performing artists sought a way to connect.
“I knew we were all feeling a deep need to connect and be able to dance and share art,” said Bre Rogers, who teaches dance at Skyview School.
After some research into what other dance artists were doing, she came up with an idea, which the members of her group agreed to right away: “Keeping a Safe DisDance,” a drive-in dance experience wherein performers set up at one of four locations, and audience members drive to each location to watch, listening to a soundtrack between performances.
Once the dancers decided on the format, they needed to choose a theme.
They selected a passage from an essay by novelist Arundhati Roy:
“Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘normality,’ trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks, and dead ideas, our dead rivers, and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
The coronavirus, Ms. Roy says in her essay, is a portal. Bre said, “It talked about using this time to go through something and come out on the other end. When you come out on the other end, what are you going to have with you?”
“Keeping a Safe DisDance,” then, is an opportunity to envision the expansiveness that could be on the other side of all of this, Bre said.
“What this did was created a community in a time that felt really disconnected and non-personal,” she explained. “It was so nice to connect with [the occupants of] one car at a time. That felt so heartfelt and sweet to share in such an intimate way. That kind of intimacy has not been occurring, but art can create a space for that portal to occur … it’s a connection and openness to what could still be.”
The “Keeping a Safe DisDance” experience included four performances:
- Distance, Connection, Direction (featuring the WhyNot Belly Dancers)
- Subterranean Dream (featuring Delisa Myles)
- Not the End Of The World (featuring Bre Rogers and Lucy Beckner)
- Hard Times (featuring mother-daughter duo Ashley Fine and Sedona Ortega)
During each of the three performances, the group collected donations for nonprofit organizations: the Navajo Hopi Foundation (for coronavirus relief), Black Lives Matter in Phoenix, and the Dine Community Alliiance.