keeping together by staying apart – Whim W’Him 2020

October 21, 2019

Dance, the most (literally) touching of arts, especially contemporary dance as practiced by Whim W’Him before the virus, is hard to imagine without physical dancer interaction, not to speak of proximity to a live audience. Yet in the time of Covid 19, all the usual points of contact, from creation in the studio to company rehearsal and performance, have had to be reinterpreted for our corporeally isolated world.

How to evoke feeling without touching is the dilemma of choreographers, dancers and spectators alike. From early March until very recently, Whim W’Him warmups were separately at home and rehearsals held entirely via Zoom. Now, when the dancers do meet—in Seattle parks or parking lots, out on Vashon Island at the Vashon Center for the Arts, and, last week & this, actually in a studio—it’s masked and six feet or more apart. [Note that the photos in this post were taken over two months ago when masks were not yet mandatory outside.] Every aspect of the interactions is governed by a 4-page document of

Fortunately, the starkness of strict separation on an actual stage or at outdoor shooting sites have been mitigated, moderated and ultimately transformed into an artistically compelling finished product by the wizardry of cinematography, as practiced by the inimitable Quinn Wharton (of whom more in a future post).

In the meantime, as with so many of the ways the pandemic has skewed every aspect of communal interaction in all our lives, it has been simultaneously intriguing and maddening to observe just how deeply the need for distance permeates the putting on of a dance program. For example, a while back costumer Meleta Buckstaff emailed me her impressions of outdoor, no-contact costume fittings (including sanitized safety pins):

I don’t think I’ve ever done a costume fitting quite like these have been. We were outside where the dancers have been doing rehearsal so we didn’t have a mirror or any privacy like we would in a fitting room or even the studio. And we had two very different days with regard to the weather. Last week we were in a parking lot and it was cloudy and cold, while today we were in the middle of a ball field and the sun was beating down on us! It felt pretty weird to try and do a fitting without touching the dancers at all. I brought the costumes and a big blanket that we put on the ground, and then I set the clothes on the blanket. The dancers each picked up their own things, put them on, and then pinned all the alterations on themselves the best they could. While they did that, Olivier and I stood back and did our best to instruct them, and even called Penny on FaceTime so that we could show her what the dancers were trying on for her piece while she’s at home in Salt Lake. It was a clunky process and it’s a lot more loosey-goosey than I would normally be in terms of getting a good fit, but it was the only way we came up with to keep everyone separate. Luckily the design for both pieces isn’t too complicated, so I think we’ll end up with something that looks nice overall. I have to say the dancers were great for being game to do it and laugh as we did something that felt kind of ridiculous.

There were also a myriad of measures taken to assure that close working together, in the figurative sense, during the week of filming, wouldn’t stray or trespass too closely into the literal sense. In their Friday morning Zoom meeting on June 1st, just before filming began, dancers and Olivier worked out the many social distancing ramifications of taking the company first to Vashon and then later to Whidbey Island for filming outside.

Instead of all bundling together in a couple of cars, it was arranged that five vehicles would go to the islands, and special care was taken so that Quinn, who had just arrived by plane over the previous weekend, could keep his distance. The meeting discussed bathroom use, where to stash belongings, and how to keep people separate.