6’

Created during the chaotic early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, American choreographer Annie-B Parson dissects the pandemic’s reconfiguration of human movement, spatial awareness, and bodily autonomy. Known for her experimental works in post-modern dance, theater, and art pop music, the New York-based artist sets her thoughts against footage from a video of a dance she made last year when dancers entered studios together, with their bodies in six-foot proximities. Parson teams up with video artist Deborah Johnson, who reimagines these performance footage through Victorian Zoetrope (one of the earliest forms of animation and the precursor to modern cinema. The technique produces the illusion of motion by displaying a sequence of drawings or photographs showing progressive phases of that motion). Zoetrope suggests about the codes of social distancing, as it relies on a particular structural spacing between images. Together with Jack Lazar and Noah Chevron’s music score, the video creates a plaintive, lyrical atmosphere, expressing what it’s like to live in this pandemic moment.

With these images and soundtrack, Parson reads from a diaristic meditation on the spatial protocols that have been set for us in our new world of COVID-19 behaviors: “Our saliva, our sweat, our very breath is suddenly in focus. Choreographed, dangerous. Issues of the body in space are being negotiated, monitored, and governed. The power of the body is suddenly very present” (02:15–02:33). She interrogates the sudden imposition of social distancing as both a public health mandate and a choreography, which demands from every ordinary individual a hypervigilance between their bodies and the space that they are in—what people are asked to do physically in order to forestall illness during the pandemic according to the imposed protocols. What Parson calls attention to is not just physical distancing, but also the erosion of bodily autonomy under a bio-political crisis. The body, once a medium of expression, is now being constantly imposed: six feet apart, masked, sanitized, tracked. Autonomy becomes conditional, mediated through a public health lens.

She notes that spatial awareness is suddenly in the forefront, asking everyone, in a sense, to have the perspective of a dancer. “These days, I feel like the great art project is the unison of the city walking out their doors at 7 pm, in a unison city dance at 7 pm. Clapping, and cheering, and banging pots. This citizen performance, this theater of the citizen body, this is the dance of these days” (03:01–03:27), Parson concludes. She is referring to a lockdown ritual in New York, where thousands of New Yorkers in quarantine stood on their porches and near their windows every evening at 7 pm, to applaud first responders and health care workers on the frontlines of the coronavirus outbreak. From a choreographic mind, Parson reframes the pandemic existence in relation to our physicality.